The Pulpí Geode, the largest in Europe and second in the world, opened this summer to visitors 20 years after being discovered in southern Spain.
The crystal cave is a major attraction in the Pilar de Jaravía area due to its size and the transparency of the rocks.
It is located 50 meters beneath Mina Rica, a silver mine that closed in the 1960s.
“The mine has an incredibly large variety of minerals. “One of them is a needle-shaped celestine covered with plaster crystals.”
Pulpí is the biggest accessible crystal geode in the world. The world’s largest, with crystals 10 feet long, is located in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.
Visitors to the cave in Spain have to walk down a mineshaft before descending a staircase that leads to the vast caverns of the mine and arrive at the geode, an opening in the rock covered with white crystals that measure two meters in length.
The rock at Mina Rica is dolomite, a type of limestone, which in the past was fractured and filled with a hot mineral-rich fluid.
Over the years, the dolomite dissolved and the fluid created an egg-shaped cavity.
The cooling of the liquid and the tectonic calm caused the formation of plaster crystals.
Pulpí’s geode was discovered in 1999 by members of the Mineralogist Group of Madrid, who found a fracture with “impressive plaster crystals”.
ADMISSION
€ 22 Adults.
€ 10 Children from 8 to 16 years old (accompanied by an adult).
€ 15 Special rate for retirees, large families, people with a disability (more than 33% recognised).
LOCATION
The Geode is located in the “Mina Rica”, in “El Pilar de Jaravia” neighbourhood, Pulpi (Almería). Address: Poligono S-AG2A 33, 14640 Pulpí
