Photo : Grottes de TRABUC / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Grotte du Trabuc
The Trabuc cave, at Mialet, in the north of the Gard, near Anduze, is nicknamed the "cave of 100,000 soldiers". Its name comes from the trabuc, a blunderbuss used by bandits who hid there in the nineteenth century. The entrance is at 220 m altitude and the development reaches 10,500 m. The cavity formed at the contact of dolomites and Lower Jurassic limestones.
Known since Antiquity, it served as a refuge from the end of the seventeenth century, notably for the Camisards during the Cévennes war. Explored from 1823, it was described in 1899 by Félix Mazauric; Georges Vaucher discovered the "New Trabuc" there in 1945, visits began in 1952 and developments in 1974. The "hundred thousand soldiers" are thousands of small limestone concretions close to stalagmites, whose formation remains mysterious, as no water drips from the vault at that spot.
