Do you know what the ground hides beneath your feet?

Do you know what the ground hides beneath your feet?

Climbing the highest peaks of the Karavanke mountains you can discover remains of sea urchins, sea snails, crinoids and even bones of ichtiosaurus, which tell about the once rich life in the former Tetys Sea. In this sea, millions of years ago, sedimentary rocks were formed, which today form the majority of the surface in the Karavanke Geopark.

On this seabed, the Smrekovec volcano also erupted and the Adriatic and Eurasian plates came together. In the process, they lifted a mass of rock from the sea floor, which today forms one of the longest mountain ranges in the world - the Alps. The most important evidence of the collision of these two plates is the Periadriatic fault zone, several hundred kilometers long, which runs right through the Karavanke Geopark and reaches deep into the Earth's interior. The Karavanke Geopark also boasts magnificent minerals that are rarely found anywhere in the world - the orange-colored wulfenite, the brown dravite, the white calcite, the silver galena, the often overlooked sphalerite and even mercury. Some of them were mined as ores inside the Petzen and the Hochobir in the past, but today we can admire them mainly in various collections and museums. The surface as we see it today was formed in several million years. The powerful forces of nature also formed the wonderful stalactite caves on Hochobir. The landscape was populated by unique plant species, such as the Zois bellflower, the carnivorous sundew and the gentian. And last but not least, here are the people who live with nature and make sure that you will be able to discover its secrets long after them...