Coober Pedy, An Underground Opal Mining Town in Outback Australia

We were only told a few facts in the tour bus while on our way to Coober Pedy Australia. One was that it’s mostly underground (and that we were staying underground), one was that it is the Opal mining capital of the world (and Coober Pedy Opal is the highest quality), and the other was that some of Max Mad was filmed there.

You can imagine the slightly skeptical yet intrigued first impression I had of the place.

We drove from Quorn, a tiny little town in the middle of the Flinder’s Ranges, just north of Adelaide in South Australia. This area was very dry, yet with a lot of mountainous leafy regions. As we drove the 6-7 hour trip, the surroundings slowly changed from yellowy grasses and trees to smaller shrubbery and redder and redder dirt. We were headed straight into the Outback!

Arriving in Coober Pedy, South Australia

After driving past an old dump lot full of about 40 old TV’s and cars, we pulled up to the ‘famous’ Coober Pedy Australia sign – made of a big pickup truck with a mining contraption. It was hot – over 90 degrees Fahrenheit – but this is actually the reason Coober Pedy is Austraia’s underground city!

We were told that you were supposed to be careful while walking around out here because of mine shafts, and saw a few signs telling us so. The possibility of falling down a mine shaft?! This really was a full-on mining town.

We drove through the tiny ‘main street,’ with Coober Pedy opal shops on each corner. The place was surrounded by a deep red, occasionally hilly expanse of desert, with little piles of dirt that had been excavated from mine shafts dotting the horizon.

We drove past a few of the first underground areas and came up to our underground Coober Pedy hotel. I was pretty confused as to what that meant at first, but I soon learned that by ‘underground,’ they kind of really mean that they dig into the sides of hills.

So you don’t have to go downstairs to get ‘underground’ into most of the houses and buildings here, you just, well, open a door into the side of a hill that will open up into a house, church, museum, mine, etc that is inside the hill.

Our hotel (which was more like hostel) was so cool. We opened the door labeled “Bunkhouse 2” at Umoona Mine, and walked in amongst the cool, polished hard rock walls. It opened up into a huge underground corridor with 30-odd bunk beds all organized into little rooms of four with curtains. Our tour group of 24 was about to have a big sleepover that night, in none other than Australia’s underground town, Coober Pedy!

There are actually a LOT of different underground dugout hotels in Coober Pedy Australia. Compare prices and accomodations here! 

The Origin of the Coober Pedy Underground “Dugout”

We first went on a tour of an Opal mine near our hotel, which is definitely one of the must-do things to do in Coober Pedy. This tour gave us a lot of background information on Opal, living underground, and Coober Pedy in general.

We learned that Coober Pedy came to be when miners came over from Queensland and the Northern Territory after discoveries of Opal in the same basin that stretched into this area of South Australia as well. After discovering what is now known as the ‘Opal Capital of the World,” miners were here to stay.

They used to dig holes into the sides of hills to stay cool, until they realized that it was much cooler in there than it was in the houses they tried to live in in the extreme weather outside.

Fun fact – the name “Coober Pedy” comes from the local aboriginal language. When they passed through the town and saw all the miners digging into the sides of hills, they named it “Coober Pedy” meaning “white man’s burrow.” Ha… Ha-ha. White man’s burrow. Lol.

Anyway, this is when things moved underground. In fact, Coober Pedy’s underground ‘dugouts’ remain at a stable 23 degrees Celcius year round, even on over 50-degree summer days and -2 degree winter days. They get pretty intense seasons here in the Outback!

Related Reading: 16 Stunning National Parks in Australia to Visit

An Example Dugout Underground Home in Coober Pedy

We got to see an example dugout on our tour. They remain very dark and quiet at all times, with of course no way to have windows, either. It is possible to live underground here because the ground is made of extremely strong gypsum rock.

Nowadays they have lots of regulations on underground construction – you must have at least 4m of dirt between the ceilings of the rooms and the top of the hill, and 1m between each of the rooms and between other houses.

That’s a lot of insulation- there are no fights with noisy neighbors here! Each room must have a hole that reaches up to the outside, and is protected at the top. No matter what temperature it is outside, it usually doesn’t actually affect the inside because it must go through 4 meters of dirt.

Learning How Opal Mining Works on Our Coober Pedy Mine Tour

These days, you are no longer allowed to mine within Coober Pedy town. You can build your house, (well not build… dig your house? Excavate it?) and can keep any opal you may happen to find while doing so. You can lease land from the government and use it to mine if you want to, but it must be outsode of town.

People find loopholes to this though – apparently, there’s a guy somewhere with a 20 room house who keeps finding ‘reasons’ he needs to renovate and expand (for extended family coming to stay, etc) because he keeps finding opal every time he remodels! And, you are allowed to keep the opal you find in your own house. So I think I would keep renovating, too, if I lived in this Australian underground opal town.

Coober Pedy Opal Mining Through History

However, the town wasn’t always regulated like this. Let’s back up to the old days when opal was just starting to be discovered, and people were moving here to try their own luck.

Coober Pedy used to be a town only for miners, who would burrow into the hill and live there by themselves on little cots while out mining, and have a family elsewhere. They would essentially live within their mine shaft, in a separate living area. But, slowly, families started moving out to the town and building bigger and nicer living quarters inside their mines.

Back in those days, you could mine anywhere, and make your house anywhere as well. People who found Opal in their houses would mine further and further without limits. You could literally buy explosives at the market while buying your cheese and eggs, carry them around all day, and take them back home to extend your home or mine (or both).

Sometimes people would accidentally blow through into each other’s houses because nothing was regulated – can you imagine just sitting and eating dinner in your living room when all of a sudden someone blows a hole through your kitchen wall?! This was a reality for the people of Coober Pedy Australia a few dozen years ago.

Coober Pedy Opal Mining Today – Other Rules + Regulations

But now, much has of course changed. The houses are regulated and separated from mines as I said, and they have (unfortunately) removed explosives from the supermarket. Oh, darn. I was thinking of trying my hand at finding some opal myself! Apparently, they had too many problems with locals getting drunk and blowing each other’s cars up. I can see how that would evolve into a problem.

We also visited the remains of what used to be a real opal mine until it was sort of overrun by the increasing population of the town in the 70’s. This was a fairly large underground maze of tunnels, and I was already fairly impressed with the whole thing until we were told that two men excavated the whole thing by hand!

These two guys started in 1922 and kept mining in the area, still by hand, until 1972. That’s fifty years! The 12-meter mine shaft (going straight up to the surface) alone took them two weeks, and they apparently had so much luck there that they kept going for 50 years. Talk about dedication.

Modern Opal Mining Techniques Learned from the Coober Pedy Mine Tour

We were taught a little bit about modern mining techniques also. You need one machine that burrows the first holes into the ground, and then another to connect them. One final machine, the ‘vacuum,’ digs and digs, sucks up all the pebbly bits, and spits them out into a big pile above ground: the same piles that were visible in the desert all over Coober Pedy.

Apparently, it makes a much different sound when it actually hits opal, leading the miners to stop and check by hand if they can find anything.

Our tour guide talked about how mining is really like gambling. You must pay a lot of money (for the machines, leasing land to mine, etc.) and hope to ‘strike gold,’ so to speak (strike opal, in this situation). Once you do find some Opal, that money gives you, say, three more months of mining during which you will hope to find even more. It sounds like such a tough and unknown lifestyle.

We also learned how to drill holes in the walls to put explosives! They did it the old fashion way, just like in the movies. you would drill a hole, poke an explosive inside it with a stick, light a few-foot-long fuse, and…. RUN! Usually, the fuses gave you 2 minutes or so to get out of the way. It was pretty cool to see it in person.

Reflections on the Aussie Opal Town, Coober Pedy

Coober Pedy Australia was just so completely fascinating! It seems so surreal, that people literally in this day and age live in dugouts burrowed into the sides of hills. It really is nice and cool inside them too!

With all the red rocks surrounding me (and a strange spaceship contraption we found close to our hostel that was actually apparently used in Back to the Future), I truly felt like I was in Star Wars and that little eewok’s would soon start peering out at me from behind each little hill.

We watched an absolutely spectacular sunset atop a little lookout point by our hotel before settling into our bunkhouse for bed – we needed it after a long day of some pretty mind-blowing adventures.