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Sistema Huautla is a cave system in the Sierra Mazateca mountains of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. it is the deepest cave system in the Western Hemisphere, from the highest entrance to the lowest reached point in the cave system, with over 62 miles of mapped passageways. It is the ninth-deepest cave in the world. It is also the 28th-longest cave system with over 100 km length. Sistema Huautla has 30 entrances.
it was long (total of all mapped passageways) with 30 distinct entrances and a depth measurement of from its highest known entrance to its lowest reached point. Sistema Huautla is the deepest cave in the Western Hemisphere and the ninth deepest cave in the world, tied in depth with the cave Hirlatzhöhle of Austria; it is listed as the twenty-eight longest at about 62.2 miles of surveyed passages compared to [[Mammoth Cave]] in Kentucky, USA, the longest cave system in the world at 420+ miles. The NSS Geo2 Long & Deep Caves Web Site, April 2021
In an expedition in 1977, the deepest point of the cave system was discovered after staging multiple underground camps, a flooded tunnel at 1325 meters, known as the San Agustín sump. Subsequent scuba diving expeditions in 1979 and 1981 proved logistically insufficient to transport equipment to explore it further. In 1994, during a 135-day expedition of 44 people, mostly from the UK and the US, 11 were cave diving using closed cycle life support systems called . They explored three parts of the sump system and discovered an upstream tunnel leading to the only known exit for the water that enters the Huautla caves, the spring of Peña Colorada. During a two-month expedition in 2013 involving 40 team members from the UK, USA, Canada, Poland and Mexico, cavers entered through Sótano de San Agustin; it took divers three weeks to reach "what looked like a calm, rock-enclosed lake about 100 feet wide", the San Agustín sump. One of them established a new record depth when stopping at 1545 meters. The new survey data gave the cave a total length of 64.2 kilometers. A navigable connection between where water enters Sistema Huautla and where it exits at Peña Colorada has yet to be found.
Since then consecutive annual expeditions have been launched as part of the Proyecto Espeleológico Sistema Huautla (PESH). In 2018, an international team of 24 cavers could not find a connection of the nearby Cueva de La Peña Colorada Sump VII with Sistema Huautla during their two-month long expedition.
In 2022, the development of 100 kilometers is reached.
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