Kincses Cave

Kincses Cave, known locally as Kincses-gödör ("Treasure Pit"), is a small karst cavity beneath the old town of Tapolca in Hungary's Veszprém County. Like the rest of the town's celebrated underground network, it formed through the dissolution of Sarmatian-age limestone by circulating karst water rather than by mechanical erosion. Tapolca sits above an extensive system of interconnected cavities and water-filled passages, the best known of which is the Tapolcai-tavasbarlang (Lake Cave), stumbled upon by well-diggers in 1902 and opened to visitors in 1912 after study by geologist Lajos Lóczy. Kincses Cave itself has not been developed for tourism and is not open to the public, but its entrance survives as a modest, documented example of the same dissolution caves that honeycomb the town's bedrock, part of the wider hydrogeological system that also produced Tapolca's famous show cave.