Driving north through the South Australian outback, Coober Pedy appears on the horizon as a field of mounds, pipes, and rubble with no trees anywhere. The ground is pockmarked with thousands of mine shafts. From a distance it looks like a landscape that has been industrially excavated and then largely abandoned — which is, in a sense, accurate. The town was built on opal mining, and the opal mining shaped everything about it, including the fact that most of the 2,000 residents live underground in homes called dugouts. When surface temperatures regularly exceed 50°C in summer, the logic is hard to argue with. The Aboriginal name for the area is kupa piti: white man in a hole.
The Desert Cave Hotel is the most substantial property in town, and it occupies its position without pretence. The main lobby, bar, restaurant, swimming pool, and a good portion of the guest rooms are carved directly into the sandstone hill behind the main street. The rock here is the same pale cream and terracotta stone that produces the opals — and in the corridor walls and inside the rooms themselves, the milky gemstone seams are visible in the raw stone.
The Rooms
The underground rooms are practical rather than theatrical. The sandstone is present and visible, but the decoration is conventional hotel rather than cave aesthetic. The significant feature is environmental: no windows, no natural light, and a constant temperature of around 23°C regardless of the conditions above ground. In December, when the surface reads 52°C, that constancy is not a minor amenity. The rooms are also silent in the particular way that only underground spaces can be — no traffic, no wind, no ambient noise from anything.
The Opal Experience
The hotel’s underground showroom has a solid collection of raw and cut Coober Pedy opals, and it provides a useful orientation for anyone who has never seen quality opal in person. The colour shift in a good stone — green into blue into orange into red as the angle changes — is among the stranger visual experiences geology produces. Tours to working mines can be arranged, and fossicking on designated public land is legal, popular, and occasionally productive.
The Landscape
The Breakaways Reserve, 33 kilometres north, is the area’s other reason to come. A sequence of low flat-topped hills in red, ochre, and white, it is a landscape of complete and ancient stillness. At dusk, the colours deepen and shift through a range that photographs struggle to represent accurately. The South Australian outback at this distance from any city is not conventionally beautiful. It is something stranger and more lasting than that.
Desert Cave Hotel is not the most luxurious cave hotel in the world. It is an honest version of an extraordinary place — a town that would read as fiction if it were not entirely functioning and real.
