Eleven kilometers from the city, there is the place from which the people of Selinunte took the material needed for the construction of their majestic temples: the Cave of Cusa.

Only there did they find tuff that was hard enough to be worked into large blocks.
The quarries were used for a very long time, and the work probably involved a large number of people.

The size of the tuff blocks required the application of a special method: the blocks were dug directly into the rock and worked on site. Only after that was transportation carried out.

The peculiarity of the Quarries of Cusa is that they were abandoned suddenly, in 409 B.C.E., because of the arrival of the Carthaginians who were going to destroy Selinunte.
Thus, even today, it is possible to see the walls of the quarries carved by the tools of the Selenuntines, some blocks of stone left in the process of being worked while others, scattered here and there, had already been detached from the rock and were ready to be brought to the city. There are also some of them on the road leading to Selinunte.
A visit to the Cave of Cusa thus makes it possible to reconstruct the entire cycle of extraction of the raw material used here between the 6th and 5th centuries BC.