Chinhoyi Caves

The caves sit in a small national park of dolomite riddled with sinkholes, about 9 km outside the town of Chinhoyi and roughly two hours by road from Harare. They were declared a national park in 1955 and added as a Ramsar wetland in 2013, and they are described as the most extensive cave system in Zimbabwe that the public can enter. Above ground the park is modest, a few hectares of bush around the sinkholes with a campsite and a motel; the caves themselves, reached down cut steps through the collapsed roof of the Wonder Hole, are the entire attraction.

The pool's Shona name, Chirorodziva, means Pool of the Fallen, and it recalls an 1830s raid in which Angoni raiders passing through the district killed local people and threw their bodies into the water; the caves were also used by local people sheltering from later Ndebele raids. Frederick Courtney Selous gave the first published description of the caves in 1888, when they were still known as the Sinoia Caves, and the name has stuck in some older accounts and maps alongside the modern Chinhoyi.

Diving here has a long record. Divers first went below the surface in January 1959, reaching about 93 m that same year, and a further survey in 1961 mapped the passages around the pool. A trimix dive over December 1968 and January 1969 reached a silt floor at about 104 m, and a US Navy dive team is reported to have gone to 135 m in 1992; the true bottom of the shaft is still not agreed on. Alongside Lake Malawi, it is one of the only two well-known places to dive fresh water in southern Africa, and the only one built around a single deep cave rather than an open lake.