LEGEND & VIEWS
The Macocha Legend & Its Two Viewing Bridges
Why a Moravian sinkhole is named for a stepmother, the old folk tale behind it, and how the upper and lower platforms show the abyss from both ends.
Check dates and availability ↗A name that means 'stepmother'
'Macocha' is the Czech word for stepmother, and the abyss carries the name because of an old local legend rather than any geological term. That a vast natural sinkhole should be named for a family figure tells you something about how the place has been understood for generations — not merely as a landform but as the setting of a story handed down and retold. The name is now inseparable from the site: it appears on every sign and in every guide's patter, and the folk tale is recounted at the rim alongside the scientific account of how the pit collapsed into being. Few natural features wear their folklore quite so openly, and it's part of what gives the abyss its particular hold on the imagination.
The folk tale, softly told
The legend, as it's generally recounted, tells of a stepmother who resented her stepson and, wanting her own child to inherit, is said to have thrown the boy into the pit. In the usual version he survives — caught on a ledge or in branches, and rescued by villagers who then turn on the stepmother, casting her into the abyss in turn. Like all folk tales it exists in variants, and it should be taken as legend rather than history: a story that grew up around a frightening place to explain and inhabit it. That is precisely its function. A hole in the forest floor 138 metres deep invites a story, and this is the one that stuck, lending the abyss its name and a shiver of narrative that guides still trade on today.
The upper viewing platform
There are several ways to look at the abyss, and they could hardly be more different. The upper viewpoint sits on the rim, near the top edge of the sinkhole, and gives the sweeping, vertiginous view straight down into the green-black depths, the classic Macocha photograph. You can reach the rim by cable car from the area of the Punkva Caves, which is out of service in January and February and runs only at weekends in March, or on foot by a path of about 1.7 kilometres. Standing at the fenced rim, looking down about 138 metres to the water at the base, is the moment most visitors come for.
From the floor of the abyss
The second way to see the abyss works in reverse. The Punkva Caves tour leads to the floor of the abyss, where you look up at walls rising sheer around you and a ragged opening of daylight far overhead. It is a completely different sensation: instead of the exposure of the rim, you get the enclosure of the floor, standing close to where the Punkva river runs along the bottom. Seeing the abyss from below makes its depth legible in a way the top-down view cannot quite manage, because you experience the height as something towering over you.
Why seeing both is worth it
If your itinerary allows it, taking in the abyss from both the upper rim and the floor is the single best way to grasp its size. From the top you register the drop; from the bottom you register the walls; only together do they convey the full three-dimensional scale of a 138-metre collapse in the forest floor. The floor is part of the Punkva Caves tour, while the rim depends on the season and on whether the cable car is running, so check what a given tour or visit actually covers.