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Natural Bridge Caverns

Photo: Yinan Chen / Public Domain (CC0)

🕳️ Caves

Natural Bridge Caverns

San Antonio, TX · Texas Hill Country

About

Four college students went looking for passages off a sinkhole in 1960 and broke through into the largest commercial cavern in Texas, named for the 60-foot limestone bridge arching over its mouth. The Discovery Tour drops 180 feet into rooms hung with 6-foot soda straws, sheets of cave bacon, and chandeliers and columns that climb past 40 feet, with an underground stream still feeding the formations grain by grain. Book the 9am Lantern Tour to walk it the way the discoverers did, lit only by the swing of a handheld flame.

Highlights

180-foot descent into Texas' largest commercial cavern40-foot columns, chandeliers, and 6-foot soda straws9am lantern tour retracing the 1960 discovery60-foot natural limestone bridge at the entrance

Getting there

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America's Best Caves22 places

America's Best Caves

Step out of the daylight into another world: the longest cave on the planet in Kentucky, a desert chamber big enough to swallow a stadium in New Mexico, an underground waterfall in Tennessee, and a living crystal cavern in Arizona. Some you walk, some you ride a boat through, and one you crawl with a headlamp. America's great caves and caverns, from the national parks to the lantern-lit show caves.