Type “Cave of Crystals Mexico” into a search bar hoping for a way in, and the honest answer is worth hearing before you build a trip around it: you cannot go. The Naica mine in Chihuahua state, owned by Industrias Peñoles , has sat flooded and sealed since 2015, and the chamber was never a public attraction even in the years scientists were allowed inside it. What follows is not a workaround.

The thing almost nobody mentions about the Cave of the Crystals is that there is no one to visit it. Not tourists, not geologists, not the mining company that owns it. The chamber sits about 300 meters down in Mexico’s Naica mine, lined with selenite beams up to 11 to 12 meters long and an estimated 12 tonnes each, grown over as long as a million years in mineral-rich water a magma body kept near 58C.