Vjetrenica

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vjetrenica (which means "wind cave" or "blowhole") is the largest and most important cave in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and one of the most interesting caves in the Dinar Mountain Range, which is famous worldwide for its karstic and speleological riches. Its entrance it not far from the village of Zavala in southern Herzegovina. In the warmer parts of the year a strong blast of cold air blows from its entrance, which is very attractive in the middle of the rocky, hot and waterless terrain.

The cave has been explored and described to a total of about 6.3 thousand metres in length; of this the main tunnel is about 2.47 thousand metres long. It runs from the edge of Popovo Polje to the south, and on the basis of analysis of the terrain, geologists have predicted that Vjetrenica could stretch right to the Adriatic Sea in the Republic of Croatia, 15-20 km away from its entrance. Along with the hydrological arguments, this assumption is also supported by the "unnatural" end of Vjetrenica in the form of a huge heap of stone blocks that have caved in.

Vjetrenica, as it known, is the reachest cave in the world in the term of subterranean biodiversity: among almost two hundred different species registered in it, 91 are troglobiontes, and about 37 are for the first time discovered and described in Vjetrenica (locus typicus). Great number of it are narrow endemic and stenoendemic.