Australia
Coober Pedy
A town built underground to escape the heat — even the church has no sky.
The church has no sky. Neither does the bar, the hotel, or the home you are sleeping in tonight. In Coober Pedy, life moved underground when the surface temperature hit 50 degrees and stayed there. The town's name comes from the Aboriginal words kupa piti — white man's hole.
Coober Pedy in outback South Australia is the opal capital of the world, producing roughly 70% of the world's gem-quality opal. The town of 1,700 people sits on a landscape so barren it was used as a stand-in for Mars in films. Underground homes — called dugouts — maintain a constant 22-25 degrees year-round, carved from the same sandstone that holds the opal. The Serbian Orthodox Church, the Catholic church, and a hotel are all underground, their interiors occasionally revealing traces of opal in the walls and ceilings. The Breakaways — a series of flat-topped mesas surrounding the town — glow orange, white, and crimson at sunset.
Solo
Sleeping underground in a mining town on Mars-like terrain — Coober Pedy is the kind of solo destination that makes every other traveller ask 'you went WHERE?'
Friends
Underground bar sessions, opal shopping, and surface exploration of the Breakaways — Coober Pedy is a group adventure in the absurd.
- The entire town is built underground — homes, churches, even a bar — to escape surface heat of 50 degrees.
- Underground hotel rooms are carved directly from the opal-bearing sandstone — sleeping inside a mine.
- The moonscape surface was used as a Mars stand-in for films — the breakaways glow red at sunset.
- Opal shops let you watch miners cut and polish stones pulled from beneath your feet that morning.
Outback Bar & Grill — meals served underground in a dugout restaurant carved from opal-bearing rock.
Greek-influenced outback cooking — Coober Pedy's miners brought their recipes with them from the Mediterranean.
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