Human beings have always been talented at finding unusual places to call home. Give us a cliff, a hillside, a volcanic cone, or an abandoned tunnel, and sooner or later somebody will install a door, arrange the furniture, and complain about the neighbors.
Across the world, communities have lived underground for dramatically different reasons. Some carved homes into rock to escape desert heat. Others built subterranean refuges to survive invasions. Modern residents may choose cave houses for their heritage, comfort, or energy efficiency. Unfortunately, some underground communities exist because poverty, homelessness, and unaffordable housing have pushed people out of conventional homes.
This list therefore includes traditional cave villages, restored underground neighborhoods, historical subterranean cities, and informal communities living beneath modern streets. Not every example is completely below ground, but each demonstrates how people have adapted life to spaces inside, beneath, or directly under the earth.
Why Do People Live Underground?
Underground architecture offers several practical advantages. Earth and rock act as natural insulation, reducing extreme temperature changes between day and night. A cave home may remain pleasantly cool while the landscape outside is auditioning for the role of “surface of the sun.” During cold seasons, the surrounding ground can also help retain warmth.
Subterranean construction can provide protection from wind, storms, warfare, and unwanted attention. In dry regions, people have used underground courtyards to create shaded living spaces. Mining communities have converted excavations into homes, while families in soft-rock landscapes have enlarged natural caves room by room.
However, there is a major difference between choosing an earth-sheltered home and being forced into a sewer, basement, or drainage tunnel. The first can represent architectural ingenuity. The second often reveals gaps in housing, health care, and social support. Understanding that difference is essential when discussing communities of people who live underground.
1. Coober Pedy, Australia
An Opal Town Beneath the Outback
Coober Pedy is probably the world’s most famous modern underground town. Located in the desert of South Australia, it grew after opal was discovered in the area in 1915. Miners arrived hoping to strike it rich, but they encountered a small problem: the climate appeared determined to cook them.
Residents began converting mine excavations into “dugouts,” creating homes inside the sandstone. The thick surrounding earth moderates indoor temperatures, making underground rooms more comfortable than conventional buildings during brutally hot summers. According to Smithsonian Magazine, roughly half the town’s residents have lived underground, while the wider community includes subterranean churches, shops, hotels, museums, and entertainment spaces.
Modern dugouts can contain full kitchens, electricity, plumbing, multiple bedrooms, and carefully finished walls. Owners may also expand by digging another room, although there is always the entertaining possibility of discovering valuable opal while renovating. Most homeowners find old pipes. Coober Pedy residents can theoretically find gemstones.
2. The Yaodong Communities of China
Millions of Homes Carved Into Loess
Across China’s Loess Plateau, generations of families have lived in cave homes known as yaodong. Loess is a fine, compacted soil that can be carved relatively easily while remaining structurally stable when properly maintained.
Some yaodong are cut horizontally into hillsides. Others are organized around courtyards excavated vertically into flat ground, with rooms opening from the courtyard walls. From the surface, a sunken settlement may be almost invisible except for chimneys, vents, and pathways. Below, families have bedrooms, kitchens, storage areas, and shared outdoor spaces open to the sky.
National Geographic has reported that estimates once placed tens of millions of people in yaodong homes, although the number has fallen significantly as younger residents move to cities. Traditional occupants praise the homes for being cool in summer, warmer in winter, inexpensive to construct, and quiet enough to make a library sound like a nightclub.
Some abandoned cave houses are being restored as guesthouses or cultural attractions. Others remain ordinary family homes, proving that underground living in China is not merely an archaeological curiosity.
3. Matmata, Tunisia
Courtyard Homes Hidden in the Desert
In southern Tunisia, Amazigh families have created underground homes designed for one of the planet’s harshest climates. A traditional Matmata dwelling begins with a large circular or rectangular courtyard dug into the earth. Rooms are then excavated horizontally from its walls.
The open courtyard provides daylight and a gathering area, while the surrounding chambers remain protected from heat, wind, and blowing sand. Rooms may serve as sleeping quarters, kitchens, storage spaces, or areas for animals. Passageways can connect several courtyards, producing a surprisingly complex household beneath an otherwise empty-looking landscape.
Heavy rains damaged many traditional dwellings in the late 1960s, and authorities developed a newer aboveground settlement. Nevertheless, some families continued living in or rebuilding their underground homes. Tourism later brought global attention to Matmata, especially after one of its subterranean buildings appeared as Luke Skywalker’s family home in the original Star Wars.
The movie connection is fun, but the real story is better: residents developed climate-responsive architecture long before “passive cooling” became fashionable conference vocabulary.
4. The Cave Residents of Cappadocia, Turkey
Homes, Churches, and Entire Cities in Volcanic Rock
Cappadocia’s spectacular landscape was formed from volcanic material later shaped by erosion into ridges, valleys, and tall formations commonly called fairy chimneys. Because the rock is relatively soft, residents spent centuries carving homes, monasteries, chapels, storage rooms, and tunnels into it.
Some families still occupy cave houses in places such as Ortahisar, although full-time traditional residents are now rare. Modern cave homes can include utilities and comfortable furnishings while retaining thick natural walls that help control temperature.
Beneath the region are also historic underground cities such as Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı. Derinkuyu contains multiple levels with living chambers, ventilation shafts, wells, storage rooms, stables, religious spaces, and massive stone doors. Researchers believe it could shelter as many as 20,000 people during periods of danger.
These cities were not necessarily permanent underground addresses in the modern sense. They functioned primarily as protected refuges where communities could remain with supplies and livestock until threats passed. Think of them as emergency shelters, except your neighborhood bunker probably does not have 18 levels and a wine press.
5. Kandovan, Iran
A Living Village Inside Volcanic Cones
Kandovan lies in northwestern Iran near the slopes of Mount Sahand. Its most distinctive homes are hollowed from cone-shaped formations created by ancient volcanic activity. From a distance, the village resembles a colony of enormous stone beehives climbing the hillside.
Residents carved rooms on multiple levels within the formations, sometimes using lower sections for animals or storage and upper spaces for everyday living. Doors, windows, electrical lines, and modern furnishings have been added over time, creating a mixture of ancient structure and contemporary domestic life.
The volcanic walls provide useful insulation against the region’s cold winters and warmer summers. They also give each house a shape determined partly by geology. In Kandovan, your architect is technically a volcano, and it completed the first draft thousands of years before you arrived.
Unlike many famous rock-cut settlements that are now museums or ruins, Kandovan remains a functioning village. Tourism provides income, but people still raise families, work, shop, and carry out daily routines inside the stone formations.
6. Sacromonte and Guadix, Spain
Andalusia’s Whitewashed Cave Neighborhoods
Southern Spain contains several communities known for cave houses, particularly Granada’s Sacromonte neighborhood and the town of Guadix. Many homes are excavated into hillsides and fronted by whitewashed facades, chimneys, patios, and ordinary doors. From the street, they may look like small cottages. Behind the entrance, rooms extend directly into the earth.
Sacromonte is strongly associated with Granada’s Roma community and its flamenco traditions. Cave venues host performances, while other caves remain residences, workshops, restaurants, or small museums. The neighborhood’s history is also connected to marginalized groups who settled outside the old city’s formal boundaries.
In Guadix, some cave homes have been occupied by families for generations. Updated versions include electricity, running water, tiled kitchens, and ventilation systems. The most visible exterior feature may be a chimney apparently growing from an otherwise empty hill.
These communities show how cave architecture can evolve rather than disappear. A centuries-old carved room can contain a refrigerator, Wi-Fi, and someone wondering why the video call keeps freezing. Progress is universal.
7. The Sassi of Matera, Italy
From Cave Settlement to Cultural Revival
Matera’s Sassi districts form one of the Mediterranean’s most extraordinary rock-cut landscapes. Houses, workshops, churches, cisterns, stairways, and courtyards were built into and over natural caves along a steep ravine. From certain angles, the roof of one home becomes the street or courtyard of another.
For centuries, thousands of residents lived in the Sassi. By the mid-20th century, overcrowding, poverty, limited sanitation, and serious health problems led the Italian government to relocate many inhabitants. The abandoned districts later underwent extensive preservation and restoration.
Today, people once again live in parts of the Sassi, while other caves contain hotels, restaurants, galleries, museums, and businesses. UNESCO describes the area as a remarkably intact troglodyte settlement with more than a thousand dwellings as well as shops and workshops.
Matera’s transformation is impressive, but it should not be reduced to a simple fairy tale. Its fashionable cave suites occupy spaces connected to genuine hardship, displacement, and community memory. The polished stone walls look beautiful; the history behind them deserves equal attention.
8. Beijing’s Basement Residents, China
Housing Beneath a Modern Megacity
Beneath Beijing are basements and shelter spaces originally developed partly for civil defense. As the city expanded and housing costs increased, some underground rooms were converted into inexpensive rentals for migrant workers, students, service employees, and other low-income residents.
The resulting population was sometimes described by the dehumanizing label “rat tribe.” Residents often lived in cramped rooms along narrow corridors with shared bathrooms, limited ventilation, few windows, and strict rules. Yet these tenants were not a mysterious underground species. They were workers participating in the city’s economy while being priced out of its visible housing market.
Reuters reported conflicting estimates, including a government survey that counted approximately 280,000 migrants living in Beijing basements in the early 2010s. Regulations, closures, and eviction campaigns have since affected many underground rentals, making the size and current condition of the population difficult to measure.
Beijing’s basement dwellers illustrate how underground living can emerge from economic inequality rather than tradition. The architecture is only half the story. The other half is the price of a legal room upstairs.
9. The Storm-Tunnel Community of Las Vegas
Hidden Beneath the Neon
Below Las Vegas lies an extensive network of storm drains intended to move flash-flood water away from streets and neighborhoods. Some people experiencing homelessness have created makeshift living spaces inside these tunnels, using mattresses, shelves, clothing, battery-powered lights, and salvaged furniture.
The tunnels offer shade, privacy, and temporary protection from the desert’s extreme surface temperatures. They are also exceptionally dangerous. Rain falling miles away can send water rapidly through the drainage system. Residents face flood risk, poor sanitation, contaminated water, respiratory illness, injury, substance-use disorders, and limited access to medical care.
Local outreach organizations enter the tunnels to deliver supplies, build trust, provide health services, replace identification documents, and help residents obtain aboveground housing. Public radio and health-reporting organizations have documented communities numbering in the hundreds, although populations change frequently and exact figures should be treated cautiously.
The Las Vegas tunnels are not a quirky secret attraction beneath the casinos. They are hazardous infrastructure being used as shelter because safer options are inaccessible, unavailable, or difficult to maintain.
10. Bucharest’s Underground Tunnel Community, Romania
Generations Living Below the Streets
After the collapse of Romania’s communist government, homelessness and institutional breakdown left many vulnerable children and adults on the streets of Bucharest. Some entered utility and heating tunnels beneath the city, where warm pipes offered protection from freezing winters.
Over time, informal underground groups developed their own relationships, routines, sleeping areas, and systems for sharing resources. Reports have documented adults who first entered the tunnels as children, meaning that underground survival continued across generations.
Conditions are dangerous and unhealthy. Residents have faced violence, exploitation, infectious disease, burns from pipes, substance dependence, and limited access to education or medical treatment. Entrances may be little more than openings in roads, sidewalks, or vacant land.
Descriptions of an “underground society” can sound dramatic, but the people involved should not be turned into characters from dystopian fiction. They are individuals responding to abandonment, trauma, and exclusion. Their community demonstrates human resilience, but it also represents a profound social failure aboveground.
What These Underground Communities Have in Common
Although these communities developed in different countries and historical periods, several patterns appear repeatedly.
Natural Temperature Control
Earth-sheltered rooms resist rapid temperature changes. This makes underground housing particularly useful in deserts, volcanic highlands, and regions with cold winters.
Local Materials and Practical Knowledge
Traditional builders worked with the geology available to them. Loess, sandstone, tuff, and volcanic formations became walls, ceilings, insulation, and structural support.
Protection and Privacy
Some settlements were built to hide communities from military attacks, raiders, religious persecution, or extreme weather. Modern tunnel residents may also seek privacy from policing, harassment, or crowded shelters.
Strong Social Networks
Living belowground often requires cooperation. Residents share water, ventilation, maintenance work, knowledge, tools, and emergency support. A broken drainage channel or blocked air shaft is not something you solve by leaving a mildly annoyed note in the lobby.
Pressure From Modernization
Many traditional cave communities are shrinking as young residents relocate, governments promote conventional housing, and tourism converts homes into hotels. Meanwhile, informal urban underground communities face eviction without always receiving stable alternatives.
Experiencing Underground Living: What Visitors Commonly Notice
Entering an underground home can initially feel like walking into a dark storage room. Then your eyes adjust, your breathing slows, and the space begins revealing its logic. The temperature is often the first surprise. Outside, the air may be painfully hot or bitterly cold. Inside, the rock softens the extremes. There is no blast of air-conditioning and often no dramatic heat sourcejust a steady temperature created by the ground itself.
Sound behaves differently too. Thick walls reduce traffic, wind, and neighborhood noise. Voices may feel close and slightly muffled, while footsteps echo in corridors. In a well-designed cave home, the quiet can be calming. In an abandoned tunnel, the same quiet can feel threatening because it hides movement and makes distances difficult to judge.
Natural light becomes precious. Traditional homes use courtyards, doorways, vents, and strategically placed windows to draw sunlight inside. A square of blue sky above a sunken courtyard may function as the household’s clock, weather report, and main decoration. Residents learn how sunlight moves across walls during the day. Visitors learn how quickly they miss windows.
Orientation can also be confusing. Aboveground, people navigate using skylines, streets, trees, and distant landmarks. Underground, one beige corridor can look remarkably similar to another beige corridor. Historic communities solved this with known routes, distinctive rooms, ventilation shafts, carved symbols, and shared local knowledge. Modern visitors should never explore abandoned mines, storm drains, sewers, or unauthorized tunnels. Floods, unstable walls, toxic gases, electrical hazards, and restricted exits can turn curiosity into an emergency within minutes.
In inhabited cave villages, the most memorable experiences are often surprisingly ordinary. Laundry hangs near a stone doorway. A television plays in a room carved centuries ago. A child completes homework beneath a volcanic ceiling. Someone serves tea from a modern kitchen installed inside a prehistoric-looking formation. The contrast is charming because it dismantles the assumption that underground residents live outside modern society.
Humidity and ventilation matter more than dramatic appearance. Poorly maintained underground rooms can collect moisture, develop mold, or trap smoke. Successful homes rely on breathable materials, chimneys, ventilation openings, drainage systems, and regular repairs. The beauty seen in photographs depends on practical maintenance that rarely appears in the photograph.
Travelers should also consider the ethics of visiting. Heritage communities may welcome respectful tourism, especially when residents operate guesthouses, museums, restaurants, or guided tours. Visitors should ask before photographing private homes or residents, follow local rules, and spend money with community-owned businesses when possible.
Informal shelters used by unhoused people are different. Storm drains and heating tunnels are not sightseeing destinations. Entering them can endanger both visitors and residents, violate privacy, interfere with outreach work, and expose everyone to floods, disease, fire, or arrest. The responsible way to engage is through reputable service organizations, reporting, volunteering, or housing advocacynot underground tourism.
The most powerful lesson from these places is that underground living is not automatically primitive, romantic, miserable, or futuristic. Its meaning depends on choice, safety, culture, infrastructure, and legal security. A carefully maintained cave home can be sustainable and comfortable. A drainage tunnel used as emergency shelter can be deadly. They may appear together on a list, but their residents are living very different realities.
Conclusion
The world’s underground communities reveal an astonishing range of human adaptation. In Coober Pedy, residents turned mining excavations into comfortable desert homes. Across China’s Loess Plateau, yaodong builders shaped entire villages from compacted earth. Families in Matmata, Cappadocia, Kandovan, Andalusia, and Matera transformed geology into architecture.
Other communities tell a more troubling story. Basement residents in Beijing and people sheltering in the tunnels of Las Vegas or Bucharest demonstrate what happens when ordinary housing becomes inaccessible. Their resourcefulness deserves respect, but dangerous underground survival should never be mistaken for an acceptable solution to homelessness.
Living beneath the surface can represent heritage, climate adaptation, protection, poverty, or exclusion. Sometimes the earth provides an ingenious home. Sometimes it is simply the last unlocked door.
