An interior space within a building which is designed to be inhabited, rather than for business purposes.

1. A dwelling place, residence, or location where someone lives: The hermit's abode was a cave.
2. Living quarters or places where people reside or have their homes: Now, there are actually those even in these modern times who have their abodes in refurbished caves.

Cave Living? Cool! Welcome to the modernized cave abode.

In sun-baked Spain, locals and vacationers are discovering the allure of an abode in cave homes.

• Are you a lover of "One Million Years B.C." and cheap, environmentally friendly homes? Then take heart: cave abiding is making a comeback.
• Down in southern Spain, Spaniards and foreigners are buying and refurbishing century-old caves and turning them into modern homes.
• These aren't your dank, caveman-movie grottoes.
• They're dry and whitewashed clean, and they have windows and all the modern conveniences; including, electricity, running water, telephone, cable, and parking.
• Most of them maintain an even temperature of 15.5 to 21 degrees Celsius (59.9 to 69.8 degrees Fahrenheit), winter and summer, without sending a single carbon molecule skyward.
• People have lived in caves worldwide and throughout history and the Spanish caves are recent and not natural in origin because local people carved most of them out of soft gypsum and limestone hillsides over the past 200 years.
• Earlier they were homes for poor agricultural workers and they reached their height of popularity in the late 19th century and then they started to be abandoned in the mid-20th century as the workers moved into the cities.
• Typically the caves range from 45 to 185 square meters (500 to 2,000 square feet), with front rooms built out from a hillside and windowless interior rooms that are more cave like.
• It used to be that the rich lived in the villages and the poor in the caves, but now it is reversed with the rich being the ones who have made the caves their new abodes.