Caverns Measureless to Man

Gozo feels like an ancient island and with good reason: the fabled home of Odysseus’ besotted captor, the nymph Calypso, it also boasts the oldest surviving free standing human structures in the world, the Ggantija megalithic temples. In fact, the word Ggantija derives from the Maltese word for ‘giant’, as the stones used to construct these temples are so massive people believed the site could only have been built by an ancient race of giants. And the same could be said of Gozo itself: hewn, battered and sculpted by countless millennia, the limestone edifice rises stark and imposing above the azure Mediterranean waters, pocked and permeated by a fantastic collection of caves, caverns and arches. Fortunately for divers, sea level change over the ages has left ancestors of these giant features far below the current sea surface giving rise to an underwater world that is just as dramatic, exciting and magical as any envisaged by Homer. Diving here is largely accessible from the shore, often from sheltered inlets cut off from the sea outside by truly epic caverns and tunnels; caverns that could easily have been the namesakes of Sheck Exley’s Caverns Measureless to Man.