Abstract
The Cova des Pas de Vallgornera lies in the Llucmajor municipality, in southern Mallorca, and is the longest cave in the Balearic Islands. Currently its surveyed length is over 74,000 metres, including more than 17,000 of underwater extensions. The cave was discovered accidentally in 1968, but it was in 2004 when a major breakthrough shed light on its real extension and importance. The cave roughly shows two tiers of passages, apart from the underwater extensions, the first one is between 7 and 11 m above the mean sea level, the second one is about at the water table level. The importance of the cave is not only related to its extension, but also to the presence of a wide variety of speleothems and outstanding solutional morphologies that evidence a complex evolution. The cave is under the protection of Conselleria de Medi Ambient, Govern de les Illes Balears (the Regional Environmental Authority) and was declared Site of Community Importance, within the Natura 2000 Network
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1827-806X.43.2.1
Recommended Citation
Merino, Antoni; Antoni Mulet; Guiem Mulet; Antoni Croix; Anders Kristofersson; Francesc Gràcia; and Miquel A. Perelló.
2014.
Cova des Pas de Vallgornera, (Mallorca, Spain): history of exploration and cave description.
International Journal of Speleology,
43: 95-104.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/ijs/vol43/iss2/1
