I had two choices for visiting a cave. One was reportedly larger, but also came with a river crossing on foot, hiking through bushes known to have venomous snakes, and a 10-meter vertical cliff climb without protection. I chose the other one, Gaura cu Muscă, or the "Cave of the Flies". This cave was supposed have an easy path to follow from the road. Yet, that easy path turned out to be not so obvious, so after hiking 50 meters up and gotten to an increasingly unstable and sketchy mountainside path, I gave up. But on the way back I realized there were alternate paths, and one of them lead to the actual cave. The views from inside this cave's oval-shaped entrance holes, over the Danube were nothing short of stunning!
Gaura cu Muscă is in Romania, on the cliffs facing the Danube river towards Serbia's Golubac fortress. The cave is slightly south of Romania's town of Coronini and the modernized St. Laszlo Fortress, all along Romania's highway 57 and in the Iron Gates Natural Park. There's a widening in front of the cave on the highway, so stopping and parking is easy. There's even an information sign for the cave. Nice!
The cave is openly accessible, but should be left undisturbed during the sensitive times for the long-winged bats (Minopterus schreibersii), long-fingered bats (Myotis capaccinii) and Mediterranean horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus euryale) populations housed in the area. As a result the cave should not be visited during the winter hibernation, December-March, or summer breeding seasons, June-July.
I found the cave with a simple Google maps search. There's actually two caves, the lower one that is most frequented by visitors and just 10 meters from the parking place. I call it the Gaura cu Muscă mai jos, "mai jos" for the lower one. The coordinates are N 44.664659 E 21.6990705. This cave is a very nice, green, a water-dripping moss cave. But it is just a couple of meters of actual cave plus some overhang, by my measurements 8.6 meters long.
The main cave is maybe 15 meters higher up and while I didn't fully explore it, it is beyond 100 meters long. I didn't explore it fully, because it was water filled, I was alone, and there were signs warning about deep water. Deep water by itself may not be an issue, but the main concern I had was the at-times muddy bottom where I might get stuck. But I think I covered most of the cave, except for the one last tunnel, but who knows :-)
Here's what the water-filled cave looks like. While the water level is, well, level, the bottom isn't, there were shallower and deeper parts.
I call the main, upper cave Gaura cu Muscă de sus, "de sus" for the upper or superior one. The coordinates are N 44.664658 E 21.699194.
The cave is well known for its stunning views out of its entrances and over the Danube, like in the opening shot and here:
I scanned both caves using my iPhone's lidar sensor, and then processed the resulting 3D models to a plan view map, like here for the main cave:
A high resolution PDF version of the map with vertical cross sections can be found here. You can also download the 3D model here, or rotate it on your browser screen here. A picture of the model looks like this on a Blender 3D editing software screen:
For the lower cave, a high resolution PDF version of the map with vertical cross sections can be found here. You can also download the 3D model here, or rotate it on your browser screen here. Here's what the map and the model look like:
Lower cave pictures:
Upper cave pictures:
Path to the upper cave starts from the parking lot like this:
Here's a view from the wrong path towards the river. Very nice, but I don't recommend, it is too steep, the rocks are beginning to be unstable under your feet.
Pictures from the Golubac fortress on the other side of the river are shown below. More information from this fortress can also be found from its home page here.
A picture of the St. Laszlo Fortress:
The processing of the 3D models was tricky this time. I use the Polycam app on the iPhone, process them on the phone to a 3D model in GLB format, upload to the my own backend systems, use Blender to adjust where needed, and then use my own software, Cave Outliner, to turn the model also to a plane view and vertical cross-section maps.
But the Polycam app sometimes fails to work, particularly with larger models, and I did the upper cave in just two parts, being lazy and wanting to avoid error-prone manual joining in post processing. But now I found out that the process-in-cloud option in Polycam works somewhat better. You need to publish the raw data to their cloud, and then the processing takes few tens of minutes, and you can then rotate, download, etc. the resulting model as you please.
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. All rights reserved.
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