It happens when you lose your front-door keys: you look everywhere for them and simply can’t find them. You turn the whole house upside down and are almost in despair, only to discover the keys sitting in plain sight.
Something similar happened this time. We were strolling through the crowded pedestrian center of Sorrento, a small Italian town, when suddenly, in the middle of the street, we glanced over a low fence and saw a 30-meter canyon with vertical rock walls and overgrown, ruined old buildings. Somewhere deep below the bridge a stream flowed, and on it stood a water mill built in 1866. This scene reminded me of an illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s book “The Lost World”; only the small flying lizards were missing to complete the picture.
Only the walls of the water mill building remain, but they look truly epic.
We decided to climb down to the ruins of the old mill. At the bottom of the gorge it was unusually humid; it seemed to me that the place had formed its own microclimate. It really was a forgotten, lost world in the depths of the city. Dripping with sweat, we pushed through the dense jungle along what had once been a trail but was now heavily overgrown, and we found no traces of human presence. Finally, following the bed of a dried-up stream, we reached the ruins of the mill.
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Ancient arches covered in fresh, vivid green. Only now did I notice how quiet it is here; the bustle of the street had been left somewhere far above.
An iron staircase led to the second floor. I climbed up, but it didn’t feel very inviting there.
A fern-covered bridge over the stream leads to a trail carved into the rock and rising upward, but we didn’t take that route. We didn’t know what condition the bridge was in.
The stream vanished beneath the rock, hiding in the darkness of the tunnel.
The bed of the stream was lined with hewn stones.
The tunnel was larger than we had expected.
The floor and ceiling were paved with stone, and the passage wound like a snake as it disappeared into the darkness.
After walking a few hundred meters, we noticed that the light of our lantern no longer reached the arch of the tunnel. We emerged into a cave. Staircases climbed upward toward the streets of Sorrento, and we were struck by the grandeur of the place we had stumbled upon by accident.
When I got back to the surface, I couldn’t get over it for a long time. I have been to the Chernobyl zone illegally many times, and there I saw truly wild nature, wild horses and other animals. But a secret place like this one, hidden right under the city streets, I was seeing for the first time.
Where is the entrance to the lost world?
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Vallone dei Mulini
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Hello!
We are French tourist in Sorrento, we are here for visiting la vallone dei Mulini like you do.
Can you explain us how to go down please?
Thanks