Toirano

Toirano sits at the mouth of the Val Varatella, four kilometers inland from Loano on the Riviera di Ponente. The town's defining asset is underground: the Grotte di Toirano, a karst complex of four cavities discovered in 1950, two of them open to visitors. The Grotta della Bàsura preserves the bones of cave bears piled in a chamber called the Cimitero degli Orsi and a set of human footprints dated to roughly 14,000 years ago, made by five Homo sapiens and a dog walking together through the cave.

The village above the caves has the layout of a fortified borgo of the Genoese hinterland, with narrow streets, a thirteenth-century parish church, and a Museo Etnografico documenting the agriculture of the Varatella valley. The combination of cave science and coastal proximity sends roughly 70,000 paying visitors underground each year.