Dante Gorge is one of the most interesting attractions of the Hot Spring balneological resort. All people vacationing in the resorts of the Hot Spring visit it. Dante Gorge is so interesting that even if you drive past by car to the resorts of Sochi or Gelendzhik, it is worth planning a stop for 1 day to visit the Dante Gorge and the Healing Park in the Hot Spring. The distance from the stop on the M4 Moscow-Don highway to the gorge is only 500 meters.
Dante Gorge is a fault on the mountain slope of sandstone. It looks very picturesque and even mystical. Associations with Dante Divine Comedy really arise when you approach this gorge: "Having passed through the middle of my earthly life, I found myself in a gloomy forest...".
The forest in the Dante Gorge really looks gloomy. There is high humidity here. The rocky soil and sandstone rocks are covered with moss, and numerous inscriptions are carved on the walls. In Soviet times, it was normal to climb a steep cliff and write the sacred phrase "here was Kitty and Osia...". There were many such inscriptions almost everywhere, both in the Krasnoyarsk Pillars and in the Caucasus Mountains. They`ve all been erased these days.
It is impossible to erase the inscriptions in the Dante Gorge, since they were not written with ink, but cut through with sharp objects in the soft sandstone rock. This began to be done more than a hundred years ago, when the first soldiers arrived at the Psekub military hospital in 1864. Then other people came here and on top of the old inscriptions they drew their own. As a result, the inscriptions in Russian turned into intricate hieroglyphs similar to Masonic symbols, moss grew on top of them, and it turned into a real decoration of Dante Gorge. They add even more atmosphere of mystique and mystery.
On the right side, at the entrance to the Dante Gorge, someone`s footprints are climbing up the slope. Perhaps they were left by Dante Alighieri when he entered the hell of his Divine Comedy. A staircase of 49 steps has been cut down along the bottom of the Dante Gorge. The walls of the gorge close so narrowly that in some places the width of the passage does not exceed 2 meters. In autumn and on rainy days, a small stream flows along the steps.
The length of the narrow part in the Dante Gorge does not exceed 100 meters, its depth is 15 meters. The road along the gorge goes up with a big slope. From the Iveron Chapel to the rotunda, where the trails of the Healing Park begins, the distance is only 200 meters, but the climb reaches 35 meters.
