Reaching Hwanseongul (환선굴) is not very hard, even if it's not really close to a big city: there's a local bus from Samcheok (삼척) to Dogye (도계) and back that stops just in front of the entrance of the cave, and it's quite frequent (maybe except in the evening, where you may have some problem), or you can reach the Singi (삼척) Train Station (which is 9km from the cave) in the Line that connects Gangneung and Donghae to Andong and Daegu and than get a taxi. The entrance is 4000won (around 2.5euro), and there's nice (but not so easy) walk to reach the real entrance of the cave. Hwanseon Cave area is very rich of caves (Gosu Cave, Gossi Cave, Chodang Cave, Gwaneum Cave and so on) and is accumulated sedimentary rock in the middle Cambrian period of the Paleozoic Era (approximately 530 million years ago) and all limestone caves in this area were created at that time.

Some fossils of trilobite and echinoderm are seen around the cave, it thus appears that the Hwanseon Cave area was under shallow-sea in tropical area and it was relocated to current location 500m above sea level by diastrophism. The cave, opened to the public in 1997 and National Treasure No. 178, has a total length of 6.2km (but only the biggest part of 1.6km is accessible) and inside it's 20-100m wide and 20-30m height with a temperature from 10.2°C to 14°C, humidity from 86% to 96% and water temperature from 10.0°C to 13.3°C. You can visit the cave by yourself, and you'll be certainly be astonished by the magnificence of this place: many formations (“The Great wall”, “The palace of dream” wall), shapes (a flow stone “Figure of lady” and “The swamp of hell”), pools (“Rice terraces”), stalagmites (“The statue of Maria”), waterfalls (“Fountain of life”, “The first waterfall”), stalactites (“Bat of a goblin”) and unusual formations like the “Royal throne”, secondary formation of similar one-sided stalagmite, which is a phenomenal formation worldwide and it's a symbol of Hwanseon Cave. In just a few words, really a not-to-be-missed stop.

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