Aragonit Cave

The Aragonite Cave lies on Gellért Hill in Budapest, just a few meters below the better-known Szent Iván Cave that now houses the Cave Chapel. Found in the 1960s, it carries the official name Aragonite Cave but is more often called the Cauliflower Cave locally, because the mineral crusts left behind by warm thermal water grew into rounded, cauliflower-like clusters rather than ordinary stalactites. Despite its small size — the floor covers only about 80 square meters — the cave is valued for the unusual beauty of these formations: its walls are coated in a white, cloud-like calcite crust studded with nodules made of calcite and its crystalline twin, aragonite. The cave illustrates the same thermal-water dissolution process that shaped Gellért Hill's wider karst system, in which rising mineral-laden spring water carved and later redecorated cavities in the hill's dolomite rock.