Spilaio  of Agios Georgios  or the cave of Saint George.

This is probably the most striking show cave of Greece! Huge parts of this narrow system of labyrinthic clefts are covered with extraordinary cave coral. A small and bulbous speleothem consisting of calcite covers the walls in crusts. Cave coral is pretty common, but only in small patches of some square decimeter. Patches of some square meters are rare. But this cave contains hundreds of square meters of different cave coral which make it a picturesque cave.

The cave is not very big, and the passages are narrow and high, looking like clefts. With a length of 500m, the cave has an extent of only 1,000m². Most passages follow a north-south or an east-west direction, obviously depending on the direction of tectonic fissures in the limestone.

The first part shows nice profiles, erosive surfaces with facets formed by flowing water. Some nice stalactites and stalagmites can be found in secluded side chamber.

As you move further into the cave you find a path that leads down a few steps to a so called lower floor. After only a few meters a spiral staircase leads up into the so called upper floor. Here is where the cave corals begin, the walls are covered by them.  Visitors get a map of the cave and an explanation in different languages, at least Greek, English and German. The cave tour is self guided, which means a lot of time to look at the extraordinary speleothems. Some formations are signposted, there’s video surveillance system that tells visitors, when they reach the interesting spots. A sound system plays a tranquil music taking your mind to a different world.

Spelaio Ton Limnon, the Cave of the Lakes, is the bed of a subterranean river, flowing only during the winter rains. When the rain ends in spring, the river and the water dripping from the ceiling stops almost completely, but thirteen waterfilled pools remain over most of the summer.

The lakes are commonly called gours or rimstone pools. They are a unique sort of speleothems, forming huge but thin and curly dams. Today it may be a few less than the thirteen pools mentioned above, as the lower ones became leaky during the development works. Nevertheless, the development of this cave is growing rapidly. It has been renewed only a few years ago and the paths updated with concrete and stainless steel with minimal impact on the cave and its speleothems. The path is a bridge-like structure, which gives the visitor the feeling to walk above the cave.

The cave has three levels. The lowest level is the natural entrance, which can be seen at the road to Kastria right below the modern entrance. This cave is mostly dry, but after heavy rains in 1922 and 1940 a wild river left the cave at this place. Although this entrance was known to the locals for very long, it took until 1964, when some inhabitants of Kastria used a wooden ladder to climb the first step of the lower cave and discovered the first lake in the higher level. The show cave of today starts behind the 9m ascent from the lower level. The entrance of the cave is at the Bat Hall, 20m above the natural entrance. This hall is the biggest hall of the tour, 40m long, 15m wide and 30m high. The reason this name was given is quite obvious, the ceiling is a big bat colony. A part of the first platform is a bit slippery by the bat guano and the typical smell of the bats is in the air.

At the end of the path, the tour turns around and the visitors have to walk back the same path. The cave is 780m long and they are plans to extend the tourist part.