Lounge on your luxury leather chair underneath a delicate chandelier that hangs from the roof of a room which has been tunneled out of a pure rock, 155 meters below the surface. As if you were Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Except for massively rich and less ring-obsessed. So ...

Coober Pedy is a small mining town in the Australian Outback. Because of the extreme temperatures (40ºC in summer), many inhabitants live in underground houses called ‘dugouts’. In fact, the name, ‘Coober Pedy’ comes from the Aboriginal name for the town, ‘kupa-piti’ which means 'white man's hole'. The area has ...