Exsurgence de la Tuilède

Beyond the entrance boulder choke the first sump lies in a translucent lake, and a chain of sumps and dry sections follows, where you climb, crawl and scramble, partly through a maze. S8 is a superb tube with pale walls. S9 starts with a long descent over coarse sand in a triangular passage 3.5 m wide, continues in a wide, sloping fracture of light-grey, almost bare rock and ends in narrow, sandy passages.

The Tuilède is the lowest of the three springs where the water of the Aven de Rogues, a major cave of the Causse de Blandas, returns to daylight, which is why almost every generation of cavers and cave divers has been drawn to it. The first sump was reached in 1932. Between 1948 and 1950 the SC Montpellier used dry summers to get as far as S4, in 1981–1982 divers reached -50 m in S9, and in 1993 S9 was explored to 430 m. From 2011 to 2019 the Plongeesout team repaired the lines, made a new survey and searched S9 and S5bis for a way on.

Practical: the explorers prefer the highest possible level, ideally about two weeks after a flood, so that obstacles can be passed by swimming. In dry summers the first sumps drop by several metres; the upper galleries can then be reached without diving, through a widened low air space above the first sump, but the carries get harder. Conditions that good do not come every year.