Uruguay Grutas del Palacio

According to lore, rulers of an indigenous tribe lived in these so-called "palace caves" and hid their treasures. However, there are no records of this.
Vaults and columns in various shapes form the cave. The front is 23 metres long, almost eight metres deep and two and a half metres high. The early European settlers probably assumed that the columns were fossilised palm trees or indigenous constructions.
In fact, the almost one hundred approximately two-metre-high rock pillars with a diameter of up to one metre are made of sandstone and sedimentary rock. They were formed about 70 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period. Later they solidified, softer interstices were eroded by water. This is an ongoing process: in front of the cave, only the "foundations" of columns can be seen, which have already been completely eroded; to the left and right of the cave, the columns have not yet been exposed by erosion. In 2013, the site was declared the first UNESCO Geopark in Uruguay.