Coober Pedy - The city where people live underground

The opal mining town of Coober Pedy is the only city in the world where people actually live on a daily basis on the underground. Even if it may not be a hot spot for tourists visiting South Australia, it is one of the most beautiful places in the country, with endless desert views and a paced down lifestyle that every of its citizens enjoy.

When Australia’s temperatures easily exceed 40 degrees Celsius, there is one place where tourists can hide, in the mining town of Coober Pedy in South Australia, more specifically, in the underground chambers that are the true houses of more than half of city residents. Over half of the 3,500 inhabitants of the small town of Coober Pedy live in the underground city. Everything here is underground: lots of the shops, the hotels, motels and backpackers, a swimming pool, the churches, there is even underground camping.

Coober Pedy – Kupa Piti in the indigenous Arabana language, meaning “White man in a hole” – lies in the state of South Australia to the south-east of a desert the size of France and Germany put together.

Coober Pedy is known as the "Capital of opal" with mine galleries that are actually used for setting this chic underground city. Here one will find, in addition to local homes, a hotel, a bar, shops and even a church dug under a hill. Located halfway between Adelaide and Alice Spring, Coober Pedy quickly became a tourist attraction, bringing tourism, currently as much money as much as they do extractions of opal.

Opal was found in Coober Pedy on 1 February 1915; since then the town has been supplying most of the world's gem-quality opal. Coober Pedy today relies as much on tourism as the opal mining industry to provide the community with employment and sustainability. Coober Pedy has over seventy opal fields and is the largest opal mining area in the world.