After four hours on the road, the professor announced that we had arrived.
The university bus stopped in front of a few pastures in the middle of the countryside. We looked around, trying to guess where we were supposed to go, but everything looked exactly like what we had left behind. All we had to do was cross a crack in a rock wall, beside a small ravine, and then, as if from nowhere, the cave appeared.
In the early 1990s, the Venado Caves were not a tourist destination. Few people knew about them and even fewer had studied them. As young and inexperienced explorers, we thought that afternoon would simply confirm the route of a map drawn in the early 1960s, covering about 400 meters of the cave. Four hundred meters did not seem like much.
The professor, however, saw things differently. It is one thing to map the surface and another to map what lies underground. He would probably have been satisfied if we managed to recognize formations that, until then, existed only in books.
Faced with the opening that promised an unknown world on the other side, some of my companions chose not to enter. Looking back, that was a sensible decision.
We carried measuring tape, a compass, a pickaxe, and flashlights. Nothing else. No safety boots, no helmets with headlamps, no waterproof clothing. We had not considered that humid environments where bat guano accumulates are also home to fungi capable of causing illnesses such as histoplasmosis.
In the first few meters, we could still see daylight at the entrance, like a reminder of the outside world. Then, at some undefined point, the light stopped following us. As we tried to adjust to the darkness, another sound emerged: water dripping steadily and persistently.
Without realizing it, we were no longer entering the cave. We were disappearing into it.
We advanced in teams of three. One person carried the flashlight; the others trusted that it would not fall. The air grew thick with humidity. We walked along the same stream we had left outside, except now it flowed through the heart of the rock. Everything was wet, except the map, which had been attached to a board and protected inside a plastic bag.
By then we already knew that without a map and without clear visibility, finding our way out would not be easy.
Suddenly, far ahead, a beam of light opened above us. It entered through an almost circular opening, like a giant shower, revealing bright surfaces and volumes that seemed to move although they were made of stone.
We had studied it before, but seeing it in person was something entirely different: a sinkhole where slightly acidic water seeped through cracks and gradually dissolved the limestone, which had formed millions of years ago on an ancient seabed.
We reached a chamber where we saw what looked like a giant, shining papaya-colored formation. The walls displayed traces of river erosion that had once occurred much higher in the cave. This underground system had not remained fixed in place; it changed levels and reorganized itself over time as sediments accumulated, ceilings collapsed, sections dissolved, and new passages were created.
We continued. The passages became narrower and, at times, we had to remove our backpacks to squeeze through. Sometimes we even had to crawl. The rock was cold and slippery. The air began to thin.
After a couple of hours, we stopped taking measurements.
By around five in the afternoon, we were all back outside. We were soaked and still dazzled. We sat beside the road waiting for Escopeta, the bus driver, who had gone to a nearby town.
Today, more than thirty years later, Andrés Ulloa and Mariángela Vargas have mapped nearly five kilometers of those galleries and developed three-dimensional models of the Venado Caves. Technology has been essential in achieving this, but perhaps even more important has been the drive to explore that underground world, which reveals part of the country’s past.
Mapping a cave requires time, patience, and many hours underground. Behind every map lie dozens of journeys and countless sketches in notebooks.
Today there are organized tours, and what was once uncertainty has become adventure. Thanks to those maps, it is now possible to enter, observe, and leave a world that is no longer entirely unknown.