Useful Information

Opening Hours


The entrance of the ShowcaveSontheimer Höhle in Germany.
Every show cave, mine or subterranea on this site has a short list of hard facts called Useful Information. With a contemporary browser it will be displayed like this text, with smaller font and darkgreen letters on white background.
In the Useful Information block you find information in a very brief form, which makes some explanation necessary.
It is very difficult to write dates, fees and hours in a well readable manner, so we always tried to find a sort of "international" way of writing it, which should be understood by anybody. But if you do not understand it, here is the explanation:

COVID-19: the pandemic had a great influence on public sites, because of varied and short lived restrictions. It is completely impossible for us to keep track of weekly changes and regional restrictions. We decided to ignore such restrictions completely, we do our best to update the regular open hours. However, some sites do not publish their regular hours, they replaced them by special times for the pandemic. If times are given for the year 2020 or 2021 please keep in mind that they might be different during and after the pandemic.

It is rather difficult to find a way to write date and time in an international way! The standard notation differs even from one English-speaking country to the next! So we tried to find a notation which is easy to understand, even if one is not used to it.

We are doing our best in providing current and correct information about any cave or mine. Unfortunately, some managements seem to spend much of their time in changing hours and fees. Some even refuse to give hours, in order to be flexible, whatever this may mean. So our main goal for those two topics is to give at least a correct set of a recent year, but not to keep it up to date at any cost. We guess it is good enough if the hours are not older than five years, and our visitors should be able to handle minor changes. If caves change the hours in an erratic way or have drastic changes, outdated hours on our site are their shame, not ours.

In general we prefer to spend our efforts on adding new sites, extending descriptions and adding background info and pictures, not updating those technical facts.