Geography

An Entire Town in South Australia Lives Underground to Escape the Heat

Coober Pedy in South Australia is the opal mining capital of the world, and the majority of its residents live in homes carved into the hillsides, called dugouts, to escape summer temperatures that can exceed 50 degrees Celsius. The underground homes maintain a constant, comfortable temperature year-round without air conditioning. The town supplies more than 70 percent of the world gem-quality opal.

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Coober Pedy sits in the remote Stuart Range of South Australia, about 850 kilometres north of Adelaide in one of the harshest environments on Earth. Opal was first discovered there in 1915, and a mining community gradually developed around the finds. The extreme heat, which regularly surpasses 45 degrees Celsius and has reached over 50 degrees, made conventional housing almost unbearable. Miners solved the problem by extending their mine shafts into homes, hollowing out bedrooms, living areas, and churches directly from the soft sandstone. These dugouts maintain a near-constant temperature of around 23 to 25 degrees Celsius regardless of the weather outside. Today the town has underground hotels, a Serbian Orthodox church, shops, and a museum, all burrowed into the rock. The name Coober Pedy comes from the local Kokatha Aboriginal language and roughly translates as white man in a hole.