Manually chipping away at rock for hours, two cave explorers have discovered a massive, previously unknown system of prehistoric caves beneath the streets of Montreal. Estimated to be around 15,000 years old, the Ice Age cave network was found about 30 feet beneath the city’s Pie-XII Park adjacent to the St. Léonard cave already popular with residents and visitors. These shafts tunnel almost 700 feet into the earth – most of their depths filled with water, and thus, pretty hard to fully explore.

Cavers Daniel Caron and Luc Le Blanc say they’ve suspected the existence of these caves since 2014, and spent much of 2017 exploring St. Léonard, which is already mapped, to find potential openings. They came across a narrow opening in the rock face that looked promising, but it was too small to enter, so they stuck a camera inside and took some photos of the chamber on the other side.

The cave explorers used hammers and cordless drills to break the wall down and get inside, finding a cavern with impressively high ceilings that leads to an underground lake. According to the Quebec Speleogical Society, Montreal was built right over this entire system without anyone ever realizing it was there, and Caron and Le Blanc may be the first humans ever to enter the newly-discovered areas.

Many cities all over the world are built right atop underground wonders, from quarries and catacombs to bunkers and smuggling tunnels, but the foundations of many others remain a mystery. Many of us likely walk over secret worlds every day without ever realizing it.

Eighty-two feet under the surface of the earth, hidden within the cellars of the Maison Ackerman winery in Saumur, France, an eerie blue-violet wonderland blooms in carefully constructed arrangements of UV-coated string. Artist Julien Salaud wound 28 miles of cotton thread around 65,000 nails for his installation Fleuve Céleste, which explores themes of nature, mysticism and shamanism against the natural rock walls of the space.

At first glance, the images seem as if they were created on a computer. But anyone who takes a tour of the winery can walk within tunnels of the glowing string, illuminated by a projected ultraviolet light.

According to Salaud, the work offers “a different viewpoint of what an animal can be: that of the Cartesian or the geneticist, of the predator or the prey, of the sorcerer or the mystic.” Conceived specifically for this unusual space, the work will be on display for three years and is the first exhibition originating from the Ackerman + Fontrevaud La Scéne residency.

Deep in a former Welsh slate quarry mining cavern twice the size of St. Paul’s Cathedral, children and adults alike gleefully jump up and down on a system of netting suspended from the walls. Bounce Below, the world’s largest underground trampoline, will open to the public July 3rd in the mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog.

Operated by Zip World, the new tourist attraction features three massive trampolines that ascend from twenty feet to 180 feet above the bottom of the cavern, with ten-foot net walls preventing anyone from falling over the edge. Customers get dressed in cotton overalls and put on helmets, then board a train that travels deep into the mountain.

They disembark to the sight of the trampolines within the colorfully lit space. Each trampoline is linked by a slide for descending and a net walkway for getting back up. The largest slide is 60 feet long. A spiral staircase leads to the other side of the railway line.

Workers prepared the space by carrying about 500 tons of rubble out of the cavern, the task illuminated with portable lamps. The mining of slate in Wales dates back to Roman times and the industry peaked in 1898 with 17,000 employees, but by the end of World War II, the introduction of new roofing materials led to many of the mines closing.

If you’ve always dreamed about having your very own network of cathedral-like hand-carved caves (who hasn’t?) you’re in luck – such a dreamscape can be yours for less than the average cost of a single-family home in San Francisco. Artist Ra Paulette has spent the last 25 years carving a network of 14 caves beneath the desert of Northern New Mexico with little more than a pick axe and a wheelbarrow, and one of the most impressive of them is now on the market.

Paulette’s endeavors were the subject of a documentary called Cave Digger, directed by Jeffery Karoff and shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination. The carvings have been called the Eighth Wonder of the World, each one incredibly detailed with shell-like relief sculptures. Paulette was commissioned to create the caves by private property owners near Taos. Unfortunately, creative differences between the sculptor and the patrons have prevented most of them from being entirely finished.

Until now, Paulette’s work has gone largely unrecognized. But ‘Tree of Human Kindness,’ a whopping 208-acre cave, has been listed by Sante Fe Properties for $995,000, with subdivided lots available for just $49,000 each. Underground power and telephone is available at the lot line. The caves have previously been used for meditation and concerts.

Bunkers under luxury hotels, wartime factories hidden beneath fake neighborhoods and vast systems of intricately decorated tunnels just beyond humble houses are among the many incredible architectural wonders just out of sight. Often built for top-secret purposes like manufacturing weapons or housing important officials during attacks, these complex and fascinating facilities went undiscovered for decades.

America’s Top-Secret Atomic Cities

“What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.” So say posters and billboards that were once posted all over Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the United States Government’s three secret cities that toiled away on The Manhattan Project: atomic bombs that would soon devastate two cities in Japan. 75,000 employees lived and worked in Oak Ridge with absolutely no idea what they were actually party to. Their town wasn’t even on the map, and visitors were restricted. They didn’t find out the exact nature of their work until the infamous atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the final stages of World War II in 1945.

Oak Ridge joined Los Alamos, New Mexico and Richland, Washington as a major research and development site producing fissionable materials for nuclear weapons. Employees brought in from other areas of the country were screened with lie detector tests. There were so many of them in this small town with a former population of just 3,000, the government had to house them in temporary huts. Hundreds of photos of life inside Oak Ridge were captured by Ed Westcott, the only government-authorized photographer during the Manhattan Project. The American Museum of Science and Energy has published them on Tumblr.

Britain’s Secret Underground City of Burlington

You’d never guess that below a charming historic market in Wiltshire, England is an entire underground city inside a system of limestone caves. And it’s not dank and primitive. Built in the 1950s to house 4,000 central Government employees during a nuclear strike, the mile-long facility with sixty miles of roadways has kitchens, laundry facilities, its own pub and even a communications hub from which the Prime Minister would have addressed the nation in the event of a real attack.

The Burlington Bunker can withstand bombs, radiation and poison gas, and was designed to sustain its inhabitants for a three-month stretch. In fact, it boasted an underground lake (now drained) to provide fresh water, and a secret rail line from London for the English Royal Family. Virtually no one knew about the existence of Burlington until 2004, when it was decommissioned – now there are photos, videos and maps available online

The Fake Washington City Hiding Boeing’s Wartime Plant

Anticipating the possibility of a direct attack on its most important facilities during World War II, Boeing didn’t want to take its chances with vast factory roofs that would be clear from the air. So at the Seattle facility known as Boeing Plant 2, the company created a surprisingly convincing form of camouflage in the form of a fake neighborhood. Blending in fairly well with its surroundings, the plant was covered in streets, trees and plywood shells of houses. A Hollywood set designer was brought in to make sure the housing development looked as realistic as possible. Boeing Plant 2 helped turn Seattle into a boomtown for technology, and the bombers built there helped win the war.

Luckily, the ploy was never tested. After the camouflage was removed, the factory sat empty and abandoned for decades before it was demolished in late 2010.

Secret Society in the Catacombs of Paris

The Catacombs of Paris are mysterious enough on their own, an underground ossuary holding the remains of about six million people connecting to a larger system of tunnels throughout the city. But in 2004, they became even more intriguing as police discovered that they were in use as a hidden lair complete with an underground cinema. Using pirated electricity, the 3,000-square-foot space even had a security system mostly made up of recorded barks of guard dogs. What the cops first thought was a bomb later turned out to be a couscous maker. Once their hideout was discovered, those responsible for it came back in the night to claim their equipment, wiring and booze. Parisians wondered what secret society could possibly have been using the space, with news outlets theorizing “extreme right-wing” connections.

The truth is not quite so dramatic, though no less interesting. An anonymous group of Parisian underground explorers calling themselves LMDP built the cinema and other areas nearby over a period of 18 months starting in 1999, and screened Urbex movies for audiences of twenty to thirty people. The main point was escaping the realities above the surface, holding free events for those in the know. Read the whole story at Gizmodo.

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