Aggteleki Nemzeti Park

Aggtelek National Park

Gömör Torna Karst

Tropfsteinhöhle von Aggtelek in den Karpathen. Engraving from 1899.

Aggteleki Nemzeti Park (Aggtelek National Park) lies at the border to the Slovak Republic in the north-east of Hungary. The Gömör Torna Karst Area has a size of 80.000 ha, 19.762 ha on the hungarian side. This area became National Park in 1985. It contains 14 large cave systems and nearly 240 smaller or larger caves.

A large, horizontal water system is the cave of the Jósva stream. Here is the second-deepest cave of Hungary, the 240 m deep Vecsem-bükki Shaft.

The Baradla Domica Cave System is famous for its formations and is the longest cave system in the country with some 26 km. 18 km of the cave system are in Hungary named Baradla Cave, 8 km are in Slovakia named Domica Cave, right across the border. The karst area was inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995 together with the Slovak Karst. Baradla Barlang has three entrances: the natural entrance near Aggtelek and two artificial entrances. One artificial entrance is near Jósvafõ and the other one between Aggtelek and Jósvafõ, near Vörös-tó (Red Lake). In other words there are three different cave tours which start at different locations several kilometers apart which show the same cave system. As there is much to say about each cave, we decided to make a separate page for each cave

The caves in this area are well known for a very long time. Obviously the resurgences were quite important as sources of drinking water. During the time the area belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire many travellers visited the caves. The first written documentation of the caves is from 1549.