The Kungur Ice Cave is a karst cave in gypsum on the north-eastern edge of Kungur, in the village of Filippovka on the right bank of the Sylva. Perm is about 100 km away, Yekaterinburg about 280 km.
At the moment the cave cannot be visited. On 15 May 2025 the federal subsoil agency Rosnedra revoked the previous operator's licence, and tours stopped in early June 2025; the regional directorate of protected natural areas became the new operator. At the end of September 2026 the cave was still closed: the regional ministry of natural resources named mid-2027 as the earliest opening date, after a report by scientists of the Mining Institute of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In spring 2026 a rockfall occurred in the Vyshka grotto, and it has yet to be cleared.
According to the survey of 2018–2021, the cave's passages are 8,153 m long. The figure used to be 5,700 m, and in 2021 the news said the cave had "turned out to be 2.5 km longer". The cave itself did not grow: staff of the Kungur laboratory of the Mining Institute resurveyed all known passages, both old ones and those found later. In the world list of gypsum caves it ranked seventeenth with the old length and would rank about thirteenth with the new one. The world's longest gypsum caves are in western Ukraine, and even in Russia there are longer ones, such as Kulogorskaya-Troya on the Pinega, at 16–17.6 km.
There is ice in the cave all year round, but only in the first grottoes near the entrance: Brilliant, Polar, Dante and Krestovy. It is always below freezing there, no higher than −2 to −3 °C in summer and below −20 °C in winter, and the perennial ice on the floor can be up to two metres thick. All of this is less than 2 % of the cave's area. The perennial ice does not melt but mostly evaporates in the flow of frosty air. Deeper inside the air is around +5 °C, and there is no ice. The ice crystals on the ceilings are seasonal: they grow over the winter and are largest from February to April.
The largest grotto is Geographers' Grotto, about 50,000 cubic metres, with an underground stream running by it. The Efirny grotto has the cave's tallest "organ pipe", 22 m high. The largest lake is the Big Underground Lake, 1,460 m² in area and up to 5 m deep.
Tours have been run in the cave since 1914, and before the closure it received about 100,000 visitors a year. Before the closure there were three routes of 1.5–2 km, each taking an hour to an hour and a half.
Kungur can be reached by train or bus, and the cave is about three kilometres' walk from the station; by car, take the Perm to Yekaterinburg highway and turn off for Kungur. Once the cave reopens, the best time to come is February to April, when the ice crystals are at their largest. Warm clothes are needed in any season.
