N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
From the Muddy Baths to Szent Gellért tér
"Doyou iee the white ridgei on high 01) the Hilld o$ Kelen? Sweating Beneath it& ónowy load it& iteamy iigh Warrrn not our icy Danube that'i blowing by" The well-pond is only disturbed in its sleep by the trams rattling by above. Its hole, where the humidity is nearly 100% and the temperature a constant 30 degrees centigrade, is accessible via a flight of stairs from the cellars of the hotel. It is an unforgettable sight! Returning to the abutment of Szabadság Bridge, we can find the entrance to a walled-in conduit next to the ever-crowded car-park. Hidden behind the entrance is the third subterranean attraction of the square: the Aragonite Cave. In 1962, a test hole was drilled at the bottom of a cavity in the St. Ivan Cave laboratory to facilitate the discovery of thermal waters and to study the changes in the levels of Karst water. The drill rod ran away at a depth of five or six metres, which suggested the presence of a larger hole. The shaft sunk into the rock beside the bored hole led to an 80 square metre cavity lined with hydrothermal minerals. Dr. Hubert Kessler named the hole Aragonite Cave. A 67-metre conduit driven from Gellért tér in 1969 made the cave accessible. The Gellért Drift was made between 1968 and 1978 to collect and conduct, free from contamination, the medicinal waters from the foot of the hill where they welled up to the hotel ready to be used. In 1916 Szilárd Zielinszky, who later became head of the Board of Public Works, intended to hide the tram line on the embankment in a tunnel. Had his plan been realised, the Aragonite Cave would probably have become known much earlier. The large- section conduit connects the Gellért, the Rudas and the Rác baths to each other. In 1970 a shaft was driven not far from the Gellért Hotel to provide an alternative access to the Aragonite Cave. Later large-section pipes of the Budapest District Heating Company were laid in the conduit, which rendered the expensive shaft useless for the purposes of medicinal tourism once and for all. The hole of the Aragonite Cave was formed on the border of the dolomite and the hornstone detritus, types of rock whose karst-forming potential is low. Thermal waters played a major part in the process according to various reports. The hole was later filled with fine dolomite dust and fine hornstone 43
