Ara Caves Garden

The Giardino delle Grotte stretches across a basin made entirely of dolomite, through which the Magiaiga stream flows : a veritable open-air museum teeming with karst formations, now owned by the Monte Fenera Nature Park, which has overseen its restoration to a natural state.

Time and erosion have altered the morphology of the karst rock over the centuries, and the Magiaiga stream, with its spectacular waterfalls, continues to reshape it day by day; humans, too, have contributed to these changes in the past, though without substantially affecting the interior of the caverns, perhaps unconsciously respecting the ancestral memory of arcane rituals.

In an old manuscript, a local historian described the Ara Caves as ‘a temple of fairies, a cave of sirens, a favourite haunt of the sibyls’. These words encapsulate an ancient tradition that suggests the memory of archaic magical and ritual practices, preserved in the collective memory, as evidenced also by the custom of collecting ‘sass bianc’, that is, the quartzites from the bed of the Magiaiga stream, where it flows out of the caves, in order to draw energy and well-being from these stones.