Crystal Cave hangs its stalactites into a lake of seawater — and the ones below the surface were never made underwater at all. They grew in open air during the ice ages, when so much water was locked into glaciers that the sea around Bermuda stood roughly 125 metres lower than today. Rainwater seeping through the soft limestone dissolved the chambers and left, drip by drip, the thin hollow "soda straws" that crowd the ceiling; when the ice melted the ocean came back and drowned the lower cave. Two twelve-year-olds, Carl Gibbons and Edgar Hollis, found the way in during March 1907, chasing a cricket ball to a hole no wider than a coin with warm air breathing out of it. The lake they uncovered — Cahow Lake, 17 metres deep and clear to its sandy floor — is not a spring but the open Atlantic, reaching inland through flooded rock, and blind crustaceans that live nowhere else swim in its dark water.
Ninety-odd steps take you down into air that sits near 22°C all year, and the stairway ends on a pontoon bridge that floats on the lake itself, nothing holding it up but water. Because that water answers to the ocean, the bridge under your feet rises and falls with the tide. Overhead the straws hang in curtains, doubled so exactly in the still surface that ceiling and reflection blur together; partway across, the guides dim the lamps and let the formations glow on their own. Next door, Fantasy Cave — shown to visitors in the early 1900s as Wonderland Cave, then closed for some sixty years — reopened in 2001 with rebuilt paths and lighting. One ticket now covers both, and the Wilkinson family, on whose land the boys lost their ball, still runs the caves.