Nowadays, life in a cave is something out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, a few hundred people in Australia are living this way, and it should be noted, they are not aborigines, but mostly immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.
According to the census, Coober Pedy is home to 1,566 people, but the city's official website says 2,500 inhabitants.
Coober Pedy is in the middle of the desert and the annual rainfall is only 156 mm. The nearest large city - Adelaide - is located at a distance of 830 kilometers to the south-east.
It turns out that Coober Pedy because of its location can hardly be called a city with great tourist potential, but still 150,000 tourists come here every year.
Great interest in the local caves: they have not only apartments, but also a hotel, museum, 2 churches and cafes. The name of the city, oddly enough, was given by the Aborigines, and in translation it means "white man cave".
Coober Pedy was formed in 1916, at that time no one here to attract tourists, and the decision to live in the caves was purely pragmatic. Coober Pedy owes its appearance to the presence of the largest deposits of opal in the area.
There was no air conditioning yet, so people settled in the mines: the temperature on the surface was regularly above 40 °C from November to March, while the temperature underground was between +19 °C and +25 °C all year round.
Later, the inhabitants of Coober Pedy began to create houses inside the hillsides, such apartments were already better suited for life than the opal mine. Fortunately, the hills here are composed mainly of soft sandstone, which allowed the locals to cut through the "apartments" of up to 450 square meters.
Such mansions are often made by combining two or three apartments: neighbors would simply dig a tunnel to comfortably visit without the heat outside the window.
By the way, windows are scarce here: they try to put as little as possible not to worsen the heat insulation. Often there are only two windows in one house: one on the left of the front door and one on the right.
The rooms in the back of such a house have no windows. And if the problem with light is solved by lamps, for ventilation you have to cut a ventilation tunnel to the surface, as on the first picture in this article.
So, living in cave apartments in Coober Pedy is a long tradition, but even now, when household air conditioners are relatively affordable, locals are in no hurry to move to the surface.
Because of the geographical distance, it costs about the same to deliver materials and build a "regular" house in Coober Pedy as it does to build an underground house of comparable size with all the utilities.
But the underground house allows good savings on electricity, which here, incidentally, costs 0.32 Australian dollars per 1 kWh + a fixed service fee of ~ 27 AUD per month.
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