Perama Cave belongs to the limestone caves and has 19 kinds of stalactites and stalagmites, an extremely large number. It is speculated that this had been a prehistoric riverbed, which had contact with lake Pamvotis, when it covered the whole area of current Ioannina, and hill Goritsa, was a tiny island.
The cave is part of an underground river bed, which was drilled during the Quaternary era, aged 1.500.000 years. The tourist route, has a length of 1,100 m. and the covered area is 14.800 m2, while the altitude difference from the entrance to the exit is 25 m. The air temperature is 18° Celsius, while the temperature of the waters of the small lakes formed in the cave is 14° Celsius.
The first contemporary reports of the existence of the cave were dated back to World War II; inhabitants of Perama, a village located just four kilometers from Ioannina, discovered the cave while they were seeking refuge from German bombing. The systematic exploration started in 1952 by a pair of Greek speleologists Ioannis and Anna Petrochilou. Then the partial mapping of the cave followed.