“ The Dead mans’ cave”: A Myth or a reality

The “Dead man’s cave” was named after an unknown who dwells there since roughly three hundred years, according to some testimonies. The legend refers to him as a “highwayman who ransomed rich people to redistribute the wealth to the poor”.

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•  The myth of the cave has always fascinated the collective imagination going back to Plato, Homers and our nearest literature. Poets, writers and storytellers have always used it as part of the natural setting or a parable to express other meanings implicitly.
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• Although widely referred to in various genres of literatures, only few can be visited, explored and discovered. One of them is called the “Dead man’s cave” located in “Tirourda”  cliff, 13 KMS far from the are a of “Ain Al Hammam, Tizi Ouzou, in the Kabylia region.
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• A 400 meter deep cave towering above 1700 meters high in the middle of a peak. The cave remains unknown for the general public although visited by the local inhabitants and those leaving in the surrounding villages.
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• The part of the mystery of it is still vivid as everything starts with a legend like in the fairy tales of our tender childhood.
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• The legend says that the highwayman was endowed by nature with a great physical strength and was more than tow meters high. The local noble men have decided to hunt him down forcing him to run away and seek refuge in the cave.
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• Once trapped inside, he starved to death stuck inside the glacier until recently.
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• Since then, many adventurers and pseudo-scientists have aggravated the work of nature on the corpse and took some bones away. One of them has even deprived the highwayman from his riffle, it is said.
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