After the CARDEXPO: Team Trip to Lurgrotte Peggau

Anyone driving back from Graz to Anger on a Sunday passes through the Mur valley. And when the team has spent the previous day at the CARDEXPO Austria at the Seifenfabrik, a small detour the next morning doesn't require much convincing. So there we were on 17 May 2026, around 10 in the morning, standing at the entrance to Lurgrotte Peggau – Austria's largest water-flowed show cave, 25 kilometres north of Graz.

We had jackets. Anyone visiting the Lurgrotte needs one: inside, the temperature stays at a constant +10 degrees Celsius all year round with nearly 97 per cent humidity. After a warm May weekend in Graz, that was an abrupt but welcome change.

What You Find Inside

The guided tour through the Lurgrotte covers about two kilometres of a cave system that stretches five kilometres in total – the longest natural underground passage in Austria. Anyone who associates the word "show cave" with narrow passages and torch-lit scrambles will be surprised.

The centrepiece is the Große Dom – a freestanding hall measuring 120 metres long, 80 metres wide, and 40 metres high, making it one of the largest cave chambers in Central Europe. You stand inside and immediately understand why it was named after a cathedral and nothing else. The acoustics, the cold, the scale: there are few places where you feel so directly how long nature managed without people.

Then there is the Riese – the Giant: a hanging stalactite weighing around 40 tonnes, believed to be possibly the heaviest free-hanging stalactite in the world. It doesn't look remarkable at first – until you understand the scale.

What a Cave Has to Do with an IT Team

Nothing. And that is exactly the point.

We spend the whole year working with screens, tickets, deployments and client projects. Saturday in Graz was productive – real market feedback on our collectible card webapp, conversations with people from an industry we usually only know from a distance. That was work with a different sign.

Sunday in the Lurgrotte was neither. No agenda, no backlog, no Wi-Fi. Two hours together seeing something that cannot be summarised in a Slack message. And that is worth more than any team-building workshop with sticky notes and a moderator.

What we noticed: the best conversations of the weekend didn't happen at the trade show. They happened walking through the cave – between "look how big that stalactite is" and "I'm bringing my family here next time." That kind of connection is different from what forms between a daily stand-up and a sprint retrospective.

The HELITS team comes from the Berchtesgadener Land, the Rupertiwinkel, and the area around Salzburg. Mountains and nature on the doorstep are nothing unusual for us. Even so: Peggau is worth it. If you're already in Graz and have half a day to spare, the detour into the Mur valley is less than 30 minutes from the city limits.