Cheile Butești Gorge

If you want to know a monument of architecture with an age of tens of millions of years, you must reach the Butești Gorges, also known as the Butești Gorge or Reef, located only 70 km from La Fetești.
The gorges are considered to be some of the widest in the Middle Prut basin. They were dug by the Camenca River in the organogenic reef in the form of a canyon with a length of about 1.8 km or over 2 km.

Geological formations, like other limestone reefs in northwestern Moldova, formed in two stages, 15-20 million years ago. In the first stage, the basic limestones were formed in the waters of the Baden Sea, mainly from corals, foraminifera, bryozoans, blue-green algae and shells of different mollusks. In the second stage, the Volhynian limestones were formed more from bryozoans, foraminifera and blue-green algae in the warm waters of the Sarmatian Sea and the Tortonian Sea.

Skeletons of ostracods, crabs, hedgehogs, mosses, lithotamnius, less often prints of fish skeletons, parts of seals, dolphins and other animals have also been discovered in the reef.

Traces of a Neolithic fortress have been preserved on the reef, protected by steep banks and a wave of earth.

In the walls of Butești reef there is a cave and some unstudied caves. In it, after some preventive investigations, were found traces of an ancient archaeological culture, attributed to the Neolithic or, according to other sources, the Paleolithic and Mesolithic.

On the surface of the gorge formed by the Camencuța stream (a tributary of the Camenca), in its right slope, another cave was discovered, following an explosion during the extraction of the stone. The explosion brought to the surface a large amount of fossilized bones, including fragments of skulls, mandibles, solitary teeth, limbs and other skeletal parts, a total of about 3,000 reminiscences. The bones belong to large mammals, such as the cave bear, the cave hyena, the bison, the giant deer, the noble deer, the marmots, etc. Also, archeological vestiges were discovered, such as arrowheads, scrapers and other objects made of flint, piercers and bone grooves, handles made of deer antlers, etc. They come from a tribe of prehistoric Neanderthal hunters, bearers of the Mustie culture, who lived here about 70-80 thousand years ago.