Cooper Pedy is an interesting town in the middle of the desert in the south of Australia. What makes this town, where thousands of people live, special is that it is meters underground. In the town, people have preferred to live in special structures built underground for centuries. The closest settlement to the strange town in the middle of the desert is miles away. The town has all the amenities found in modern cities. The town attracts great attention from visitors with its interesting life and soil heaps that give the appearance of the moon.
Although the place where the town is located is an Aboriginal settlement, its population has become quite crowded with the people who came to the town later on. Few people living in the area Aborigines, He named the town “kupa-piti” meaning “white man’s underground hole”, “water hole”. About 80 percent of the people of Coober Pedy live underground. In addition to the underground houses where everything necessary for normal life is available in the town, there are many structures such as a church, private cremation areas, underground art galleries, restaurants and shops.
Why the People of Coober Pedy Live Underground
Coober Pedy, which has the title of the most interesting town in the world, is located 846 km north of Adelaide, South Australia. The town, which is one of the driest regions in the world, has important mineral deposits from which opal stone is extracted. Due to the opal resources in the region, there was a migration of miners to the town in 1915 and later. Huge pits were dug to mine underground, and these pits turned into living spaces over time. In order to be protected from the temperatures exceeding 43 degrees in summer, the miners combined the pits they dug after a while and turned them into a living space.
The region, which is constantly exposed to dust storms due to its geographical location, is dominated by unbearable heat and drought. The townspeople, looking for a solution to these difficult conditions, built underground houses to obtain a cooler and livable air. The old emptied mines were connected to each other and turned into shelters, electricity was drawn and pipes stretching to the surface for fresh air were laid. The local people, away from the hot sun above the ground, live in the cool air with an average of 25 degrees below the ground. Despite the very cold weather during the winter months, they continue to live in underground houses.
Aboriginal people lived there for thousands of years before Europeans came to the area. But today, only a very small part of the townspeople are Aborigines. Italian writer Umberto Eco discovered the town in the 1980s and built the first hotel in the town. The town that started to attract attention; It has become a tourist attraction center where foreign guests are hosted, rather than being a region where local people live. Tourists coming to the region can visit cave houses and stay in hotels made of caves.
