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THE BOOK “NAICA – THE CRYSTAL CAVES”

At the start of the third millennium, in the depths of a silver mine in northern Mexico, a discovery was made of something almost unique on our planet: a hidden cave, buried 300 metres below the surface, where hundreds of thousands of years ago, Nature created an extraordinary treasure... It seemed to have come straight out of a comic book, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, protected and preserved by the constant humidity and, above all, by temperatures impossible for anyone to endure – above 46°C. We had the privilege and the responsibility of exploring a small window, open for a miniscule fragment of time in the Earth’s geological history, destined to become part of human geography. Exploring and documenting the caves of Naica would take five years of dangerous missions by an international team led by the La Venta Association, which developed the necessary technologies to survive and operate in this mortal environment. Finally, after many years, in 2021 we succeeded in charting all of the phases of this complex project in a book put together by Tullio Bernabei, Antonio De Vivo, Paolo Forti, Francesco Lo Mastro and Natalino Russo. The purpose was to honour that experience by describing how we managed the project, living to tell the tale and shining a light on what is perhaps the greatest wonder of the subterranean world.

Facts & Figures: 224 colour pages More than 200 photos and drawings 150 gsm matte coated paper 3 different editions: Italian, English, Spanish

The book is available to buy on Amazon.

BANFF MOUNTAIN FILM FESTIVAL WORLD TOUR

La Venta is doubling up! After being the host for the evenings held in Padua in 2019 and 2021, in 2022 two of our members were guests on the Italian tour of the BANFF Mountain Film Festival, the international festival of films on adventure, exploration and extreme sports, which this year is celebrating its tenth anniversary. On the evenings of 9 March in Pietra Ligure and 16 March in Padua, Alessandro Beltrame delighted the crowd with a talk on documenting extreme environments, before Tono de Vivo did the same with his talk on Naica, home to the giant crystal cave – a subterranean wonder under the desert in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico.

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