Dâlbina Cave is a cave of small dimension in Vânătare Polje, Ponor village, Alba county. The cave is located Trascau Mountains, near Valea Poienii hamlet. You can get there from Aiud, on the road that leads to Ponor.
The cave has been inhabited since the prehistoric times. There were culture traces of the late Bronze Age. It was explored and mapped by Viorel Roru Ludusan in 1982 after the information taken from the locals.
It is a fossil cave that does not have an organized body of water, with a heart-shaped entrance of 6 meters wide. The entry breaks Vânătării wall, at 2meters high besides the stream’s bed. Once climbed the input waterfall, you enter a round room of 30 meters diameter of 10-15 meters high. The almost horizontal floor is covered with boulders and mud resulting from the accidental floods occurring in Vânătările Ponorului Polje in which is back is found. All the water that disappears here, it appears after 18 meters in the final part of the cave’s Huda lui Papara. At powerful rains, all the water that is collected in the Polje must be drained in Ponorul Vânătare. Incidentally, it may clog with other materials, branches or haystacks. Then it is formed a temporary lake that may rise to a few tens of meters high, flooding also Dâlbina cave. When the water’s pressure exceeds the strength of the stopper, it is dissipated and the water rushes with great flow on the active gallery of Huda lui Papara Cave. Hence was born the legend of Soloman (from Huda lui Papara Cave. The phenomenon is very irregular, perhaps once a decade.
In the only room of Dalbina Cave you can see a few “speleoteme” (concretions of caves, formed by physico-chemical precipitation), some parietal leakage and some stalactites.
The cave can be visited without any problems. Only at the entry there is threshold of 2 meters that must be climbed and might give you some headaches; you will possibly need a flashlight to see in the darker corners, otherwise the light that gets through the entrance of the cave is not strong enough to visit the cave. At a few tens of meters is Dâlbina Waterfall and the Little Cave from Vânătare.
