Thailand: cave where teenagers were saved reopens to the public

Visitors to Thamluang Cave reopened to the public on November 1, 2019 in Thailand.

The Thai Cave Theater's spectacular rescue, in 2018, of a team of young soccer players trapped inside the flooded cave for over two weeks reopened to the public on Friday.

Some 2,000 tourists visited the site, now known worldwide, on this day of reopening.

Thirty at a time are allowed to come to the entrance. "They can, with the aid of a torch, light the cavity on about fifty meters," Kamolchai Kotcha, director of the authority supervising the site, told AFP.

They are not yet allowed to actually get in because "we have to study the route they will take and other details," he adds.

The Thamluang cave in northern Thailand was closed to the public after the adventure of the twelve teenagers on the wild boar team and their trainer.

Young people aged 11 to 16 were found after nine days. It had taken nine more days to extract them from the cave, sleeping on diving stretchers.

This unprecedented international relief operation had mobilized hundreds of rescuers day and night and kept millions of people alive around the world.

Since then, the site, until then a quiet place far from the tourist circuits, sees the visitors flocking.

And the authorities aim to make it a major tourist center.

An information center was opened and a gigantic statue erected in memory of a Thai diver who died during the rescue. Equipment used by the relief workers will remain inside the cave to be exposed to the public.

The government has released 50 million baht (about 1.5 million euros) to develop the site and its surroundings.