Kommelin luola or the cave of of Kommeli is a very interesting cave on a near the shores of Kallajärvi lake, just south of Mikkeli. For once, this is a Finnish cave that looks like a cave with a proper hole in the front of a cliff face, gets dark inside, and has some interesting crawling.
The cave has grown out of cracks in the gneiss (?) rock, I guess cracked pieces eventually fell out. Not sure why the cracking, weaker parts in the rock? In any case, the end result is a big black hole staring at you from the cliff face.
Inside the cave is largest just by the entrance hole, 4-5 meters wide and with plenty of height. The floor is on two levels, left is higher than right but you can walk upright on both sides. The left side ends, though, while the lower right side continues straight in. After a narrow tunnel you enter a second, small room. From there on you can crawl a bit forward, but the tunnel gets lower (around 75cm) and then ends. Here's the end:
However, there's a side tunnel to the left from the second room, I call this the side connection tunnel. If you crawl through that you can enter the third room which is maybe four meters long. It is oriented the in the same direction as the rest of the passages in the cave, from the map we can see that it almost touches the left side that ended soon after the entrance. That room is quite tight, though. But you can sit upright there and turn around. Side connection and the third room:
I made a made map by first taking a 3D model and then feeding that to the map-making program.
And you can rotate the 3D model on your browser by clicking on this link (wait a while for the model to load). If you want to download the model, it is here.
From this map, and measuring distances in the 3D model I concluded that the cave length is 17.5 meters, not the 11 meters mentioned in other sources. If you start from the point where the roof starts above the lower/right path, the distance to the very end of the direct line ahead is 11.5 meters (and would be more if we started from the left where the roof is further out). Then the side connection tunnel is about 2 meters, and the third room about 4 meters long.
A screenshot of the model is below, followed by the plan and cross-section views version of the map. A high-resolution full version of the map is in PDF format here.
Inside the cave is nice:
The cave is at coordinates N 61.647494 E 27.191433. Reportedly, there is another cave nearby, a boulder cave. I did not have time to look for it. There's a sign at the road where the path for the cave begins at N 61.653606 E 27.188483, and ample parking just on the other side of the highway underpass, park at N 61.654324 E 27.189139. The walk from the sign to the cave is about 800 meters.
More reading about Kommeli can be found from the Daphnion blog, Retkipaikka article, Länsi-Savo news article, and Aarteen etsintaa Salon seudulla blog.
More photos below, first the entrance and exit:
This article has also been published at Planetcaver.net here. 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. Photos and text (c) 2026 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.
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