After growing up in Manhattan, Thea Carini landed in Bourré – a tiny French stone-mining town with dozens of homes built into the mountainside.

Fifteen years ago, she moved into her first cave home in France (a rental she nicknamed “the hobbit house”) and never really left.

Since then, she’s restored four different troglodyte homes, one after another, each carved into the hillside of a small French town where hundreds of families still live inside the rock, in caves cut out of the earth centuries ago to build the region’s châteaux.

Her town of Bourré is only about 1 square mile, but it sits on about 350 miles of tunnels that go deep inside the earth, spread across seven levels.

In this video, Thea takes us through her own cave-hopping history, into her neighbors’ homes, and out into the town itself: one of the strangest and most underground places we’ve ever filmed.