
I'm in Norway, traveling between Oslo and Bergen. But are there any caves that I could visit? Turning to Google, I do find some, but they are generally too far out of my reach. The good caves appear to be much higher up north. However, just a kilometer from the city center of Bergen there's Maraminehollet. It is a city cave, with everything that comes with it. Easy to access, there's a sign, there's a bench next to it. But to enter, you must first pass the beer cans and park chemists :-)
A nice, short cave visit. The cave is pretty tight, you have to squeeze in at some points. I was able to go to the end if you just go horizontally forward. This was around 17 meters from the entrance. But, I was alone, and did not dare to go the two side tunnels leading down to the right. They were sloped, looked wet and muddy, had a rope in them, and I wasn't 100% certain I'd be able to get back up. Maybe a sane decision... but also maybe one that I regret. Could have been interesting.
There were some spiders in the cave as well. Big ones:

But also locals hanging out by the bench. And there was a pile of empty beer bottle by the entrance, and garbage inside. The locals felt like they had been sampling the beer or stronger.
And the garbage. Including, yikes, medical syringes. And this was 17 meters in, at the end of the main passage. In a tight cave. Although I didn't touch it, it is possible that it was just packaging, blown by the wind. But even wind... not sure it would really carry things this far.
Be careful if you visit this cave.


The cave is at these coordinates: N 60.4046321 E 5.3223898. I also tried to make a 3D scan of the cave with my iPhone, and then process the resulting 3D model to a rudimentary cave map. However, this turned out to be pretty difficult. The iPhone's lidar and camera sensors have only a certain range they operate in. Not too far, but I have found them to not work well too close either. This, combined with the difficulty of pointing the phone to all the right directions at every point in the cave was the problem.
So the results are not as great as they would be in some other, a bit larger caves (for an example, see this one from Austria).
Nevertheless, the models are here (GLB format, Blender format, browser version). And the resulting map, heavily edited manually due to missing model parts is below. But as noted earlier, I did not visit the entire cave, so big parts are likely missing. Here's the plan view map and a few of the cross sections. A higher-resolution PDF with everything is here.
Photos, first from the entrance:
Then inside:
There was a plaque in the rock:
And here's the path from the street, leading to the park and the cave. the cave is just 15 meters along this path.
City of Bergen was of course wonderful. Some pictures:


Read the full Planetskier series at planetskier.net, urban exploration stories from theurbanexplorer.net, and other underground stories from planetcaver.net, or all blog articles from Blogspot, TGR. Photos and text (c) 2025 by Jari Arkko, except where otherwise indicated. All rights reserved.