Introduction to Coober Pedy

854km (529 miles) NW of Adelaide; 689km (427 miles) S of Alice Springs

People come to this Outback town for one thing: opal. If you're not in Coober Pedy looking for opal, then you're probably here to buy some. And there's lots of it. Coober Pedy is the largest opal mining town in the world.

No matter how you get to Coober Pedy, it always feels as if you are in the middle of nowhere -- and you pretty much are. Hours of remote driving, much of it on dirt tracks, is required to get anywhere else -- Oodnadatta is 195km (121 miles) away, and William Creek (pop. 12) is 166km (103 miles).

Even when you get here, on first glance, there doesn't seem to be much here -- but that's because most people live underground. In summer, temperatures can and often do climb to a searing 125°F (50°C), so the locals, well used to digging underground tunnels in their day-to-day work as opal miners, have created a subterranean town -- the biggest in Australia. Underground homes remain at a constantly pleasant 71° to 78°F (22°-26°C) and renovations are simple: Simply dig yourself a new cupboard, bookshelf, or room -- and who knows, you may even find some opal in the process!

The first opal was found here in 1915, but it wasn't until 1917, when the Trans Continental Railway was completed, that people began seriously digging for the stones. The town got its name from the Aboriginal words kupa piti, commonly thought to mean "white man's burrow." Remnants of the holes left by early miners are everywhere, mostly in the form of bleached-white hills of waste called "mullock heaps." You can look for opals (called "noodling") on the public noodling reserve in the center of town -- it's free, and occasionally visitors do find good-size opals. Noodling on the mine sites around town is discouraged, however, as visitors have been known to come to grief after falling down the mine shafts.