What to See Inside Sterkfontein Caves
The guided cave tour, the fossil preparation laboratory and the upgraded museum — a concierge guide to the highlights of a Sterkfontein visit since the 2025 reopening.
A Sterkfontein visit splits naturally into the guided underground cave tour and the above-ground museum, exhibition, Timeline Walk and fossil preparation laboratory. All of it is new: December 2022 flooding at the cave entrance destabilised the structure and closed the site for more than two years, and it reopened on 15 April 2025 with LED lighting through the passages, new signage, a state-of-the-art preparation laboratory and an upgraded museum. Knowing the highlights ahead of time helps you plan an unhurried two-to-three-hour visit.
What is the guided cave tour like?
The tour leads visitors through a genuine dolomite cave system — formed 20 to 30 million years ago, with over 2.5 km of mapped chambers — past stalactites and stalagmites each formed over millions of years, and down to the tour's lowest point, the Elephant Chamber. A guide accompanies the group throughout, explaining the excavation history and the science behind dating the fossils, with helmets provided for the low sections. Since the 2025 reopening the passages are lit with LED lighting and carry new interpretive signage.
Allow real time in the excavation chambers specifically — Sterkfontein is described by its operator as an active excavation site like no other, and standing in the cave system that produced a 3.67-million-year-old skeleton is a different experience from viewing a fossil behind glass. Guides are generally happy to answer detailed questions.
What does the fossil preparation laboratory show?
Unlike a static museum display, the fossil preparation laboratory is a working scientific facility where the technical team, postgraduate students and researchers clean, sort, document and catalogue fossils — not only from Sterkfontein but from numerous sites across the Cradle of Humankind. Being able to watch and talk to them is new: the public-facing lab, modernised ahead of the 2025 reopening, is a first for the site.
This is often the section that most surprises first-time visitors, since it makes clear the site isn't a finished historical exhibit but an active research operation. The lab, like the museum, is wheelchair accessible.
What is there to see above ground?
The museum was rebuilt ahead of the 2025 reopening and tells the story of the first discoveries at the caves and the iconic fossils of the Cradle of Humankind. Alongside it, a newly developed temporary exhibition space displays some of the most iconic finds from Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, including one of only two full casts of the Little Foot skeleton — the most complete early hominin yet discovered — and brand-new material from Swartkrans Cave, among it the first complete leg of a Paranthropus.
The Timeline Walk and the site's scenic trails run above ground through the landscape where these ancestors once roamed, with interactive exhibits along the way, and the museum, labs and Timeline Walk are all wheelchair accessible. Doing the above-ground half before the cave tour gives useful context for what you are about to see underground; doing it afterwards works well as a way to consolidate what the guide explained.
Frequently asked
What is the main highlight at Sterkfontein Caves?
The guided cave tour down to the Elephant Chamber through a cave system that produced Mrs Ples and Little Foot, combined with the working fossil preparation laboratory where researchers and students can be seen cleaning and cataloguing genuine fossil material.
Can you see the actual fossils Mrs Ples and Little Foot?
Not those two originals — the Little Foot skeleton is curated at the Hominin Vault at Wits in Johannesburg, and Mrs Ples (Sts 5) is held by the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria. But the exhibition opened in 2025 does display iconic finds from Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, including one of only two full casts of Little Foot and the first complete leg of a Paranthropus.
Is there a museum as well as the caves?
Yes — an upgraded museum and a temporary exhibition space opened with the site in April 2025, alongside the Timeline Walk and the working fossil preparation laboratory, all above ground and wheelchair accessible.