Cango Caves: Karst, Conservation and the Underground Klein Karoo

About 29 kilometres north of Oudtshoorn, where the dry farmland of the Klein Karoo meets the first slopes of the Swartberg, a modest entrance in a limestone hillside opens into one of the oldest tourist attractions in South Africa. The Cango Caves are a chain of great halls hung with stalactites and filled with columns of dripstone, formed over millions of years by water working slowly through rock. They are also a lesson in what happens when a fragile natural wonder becomes popular: for more than two centuries, people have been trying to show the caves off and protect them at the same time. On Day 4 of our Southern Africa Tour, the group spends the afternoon here after a morning on an ostrich farm.

How the Cango Caves formed

The caves lie in limestone of the Cango Caves Group, a sequence of very old rocks laid down in the late Precambrian, long before the first plants colonised the land. Limestone is made largely of calcium carbonate, which dissolves slowly in slightly acidic water. That is the key to every cave of this kind, a type of landscape that geologists call karst.

The process is simple to describe and very slow in practice. Rainwater picks up carbon dioxide as it soaks through soil, becoming a weak acid. Moving through cracks in the limestone, it dissolves the rock and gradually opens up passages and chambers. At Cango, this hollowing out is thought to have happened over roughly the last 20 million years, while the cave was still full of water. Around four million years ago, as rivers in the area cut down to the level of the cave, the water drained away, the chambers filled with air, and the formations that visitors come to see could begin to grow.

Stalactites, stalagmites and flowstone

The formations, which cave scientists call speleothems, are the reverse of the process that made the cave. Water seeping down from above carries dissolved calcium carbonate. When it reaches the open air of a chamber, it gives up some of its carbon dioxide, and the mineral it was carrying comes back out of solution as calcite, one thin layer at a time.

Where water drips from the ceiling, it builds stalactites downwards; where the drops land, it builds stalagmites upwards, and in time the two can meet as a column. Water spreading in a film over a wall or floor lays down flowstone, smooth sheets and cascades that can look like a frozen waterfall. Growth is extremely slow: on average, stalactites lengthen by around a tenth of a millimetre a year, though the rate varies widely with the supply of water. A formation as tall as a person can represent many thousands of years.

Inside Cango 1: the great halls

The cave system is much bigger than what visitors see. Explorers found a second section, Cango 2, in 1972, and a third, Cango 3, in August 1975, after draining a flooded chamber; estimates of the total length of passages range from more than four to over five kilometres. Only about a quarter of the system, all of it within the original Cango 1, is open to the public. The rest is closed to protect it.

The 1972 breakthrough was made by James Craig-Smith, Luther Terblanche and Dart Ruiters, pushing on beyond the end of the known cave. Cango 3 took more effort still: the way in lay through a chamber full of water, which had to be drained before the explorers could reach the passages beyond. Both later sections have been kept closed to visitors, which has spared them the wear the show cave has suffered.

The first chamber is also the grandest. Van Zyl’s Hall is roughly a hundred metres long and around 16 to 18 metres high, and its best-known formation is Cleopatra’s Needle, a spike about nine or ten metres tall that guides say is some 150,000 years old. Beyond it lies Botha’s Hall, home to a tilted column nicknamed the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a series of smaller chambers leading on towards the Drum Room. Formations along the way carry fanciful names, from the Organ Pipes to the Frozen Waterfall. The ages quoted for them are popular estimates rather than scientific dates, but they give a fair sense of the timescale.

Other names along the way reflect the guides who coined them over generations: a cluster known as the Dried Tobacco Leaves in Van Zyl’s Hall, and further in, Lot’s Chamber and the Bridal Chamber, where a pale formation is said to resemble a weeping bride. Part of the pleasure of the visit is seeing how each generation of visitors has read its own pictures into the rock.

Who first sheltered in the Cango Caves?

People knew this place long before any colonist did. The entrance area was used as a shelter in the Middle and Later Stone Age; the San and Khoisan people who used it stayed near the daylight rather than venturing into the dark chambers. In 1930 the archaeologist A. J. H. Goodwin of the University of Cape Town carried out a test excavation at the entrance and found stone tools and other traces of occupation. There were once paintings near the entrance as well, but they have since been destroyed.

Explorers, guides and early visitors

The first recorded exploration came in July 1780, when Jacobus van Zyl entered the cave with the teacher Barend Oppel and a herder named Klaas Windvogel. Van Zyl was lowered by rawhide thongs into the great hall that now bears his name. Some accounts credit Windvogel with finding the cave in the first place, a reminder that local knowledge often came before the official story.

Visitors followed quickly, and so did damage. Early tourists broke off stalactites as souvenirs and scratched their names into the walls and pillars. In 1820 the Cape governor, Lord Charles Somerset, issued regulations to protect the caves against vandalism, often described as among the first environmental protections in South Africa. The government took control and began charging entry fees from 1828; a gate was installed in 1891, and the municipality of Oudtshoorn took over in 1921. In the early 1800s, visitors had paid five rixdollars to enter. The caves were proclaimed a protected site in 1938, and South Africa’s heritage authority still lists them today.

For decades the face of the caves was Johnny van Wassenaar, the first official guide, who led visitors from the 1890s until 1934. Electric lighting arrived in 1928. Later improvements were not always kind to the cave: in the 1960s and 1970s, floors were concreted and coloured lights and music were added, changes that made the visit easier but that today’s conservationists see as part of the cave’s problems.

The pressures of a popular cave

A show cave is a delicate system. Its formations depend on stable temperature and humidity and on the slow chemistry of water and air, and visitors disturb all of these. In normal years the Cango Caves receive around 250,000 visitors. Their breath raises the level of carbon dioxide in the chambers, which can stop calcite formations from growing, and lights and breath together have been blamed for discolouring the formations.

Lighting brings its own problem in show caves around the world: warm, permanently lit surfaces can allow algae and mosses to grow on rock that would otherwise stay bare, a growth cave scientists call lampenflora. Managing light, heat and visitor numbers is now a central task for any cave of this kind.

Management has not always been straightforward. In 2015, conservation groups warned that the caves faced a crisis: the municipality was accused of diverting money from the caves’ own fund, the scientific advisory committee had been disbanded years earlier, a management plan had never been approved, and the main governing document still dated from 1975. More recently, during the pandemic the caves reopened in September 2020 with group sizes cut from 100 to 20, and in May 2026 floods brought rockfalls onto the access road and closed the caves until they reopened in July.

Why are most of the Cango Caves closed to visitors?

To protect them. Only about a quarter of the system, within Cango 1, is open to the public, and the deeper sections discovered in the 1970s have been kept closed for conservation. Every visitor changes the air, temperature and humidity of a chamber, so keeping most of the cave untouched gives its formations the best chance of surviving as they are.

Which Cango Caves tour will the group take, and how demanding is it?

The tour itinerary lists an afternoon tour of the Cango Caves without naming the route, so confirm the details with your Tour Leader. The caves offer two tours. The Heritage Tour takes about an hour, visits the great halls as far as the Drum Room, and is considered suitable for all ages. The Adventure Tour takes about 90 minutes and covers just over a kilometre with 416 steps, including the steep climb of Jacob’s Ladder and squeezes as low as 27 centimetres; it is not advised for anyone with heart, knee or breathing problems, high blood pressure or claustrophobia. Its narrowest points have names that tell you what to expect: the Tunnel of Love, which shrinks from 74 to about 30 centimetres high, the Devil’s Chimney, just 45 centimetres high and 3.5 metres long, and the Devil’s Post Box. For most travellers on this tour, the Heritage Tour is the one to choose.

What is the temperature inside the caves?

A steady 18 °C, all year round, and the air is humid. That can feel cool after a hot afternoon outside or mild on a winter day, so a light layer you can carry is useful. Wear comfortable shoes with good grip, as cave floors can be damp.

The Cango Caves on the Southern Africa route

The caves make a natural pair with the morning’s visit to one of the Oudtshoorn ostrich farms. Both are about the Klein Karoo’s relationship with time and money: the feather boom lasted a few decades, while the formations underground have been growing for hundreds of thousands of years. The group spends the night in Oudtshoorn before the route moves on to Knysna, where Day 5 is spent at the Featherbed Nature Reserve on the lagoon’s Western Head. Our guide to South Africa’s Garden Route covers the wider coast.

The Cango Caves are one stage in a route that our overview of the Southern Africa cultural journey traces from the Cape to Soweto. Few places on it show the deep time of the region so clearly. Standing in Van Zyl’s Hall, with the Klein Karoo’s heat left behind at the entrance and formations rising out of the half-light, it is easy to see why people have been coming here for more than two hundred years, and why the hardest part has always been keeping it as they found it.