Toirano Caves

A short drive inland from Loano, the Grotte di Toirano are among the finest karst cave systems open to the public in Liguria. The guided tour takes you through a sequence of chambers filled with stalactites and stalagmites, ending in a section with palaeolithic bear remains and prehistoric human footprints pressed into the ancient clay floor.

The caves maintain a constant temperature of around 15°C — welcome in summer, bracingly cold in winter. Tours run throughout the day, and the village of Toirano above the caves has a medieval castle and a pleasant piazza worth lingering in after the underground visit.

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The caves contain Palaeolithic bear tracks — imprinted in the clay floor around 100,000 years ago — alongside human footprints and handprints left by cave-dwellers roughly 12,000 years ago. The bears appear to have used the cave for hibernation; the evidence of both species living in the same space, separated by tens of thousands of years, makes this one of the more affecting prehistoric sites in Italy.

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