[airstrike]

First time I heard it in English! Your comment made me want to dig deeper... It looks like it comes from the Latin "spelunca", meaning "cave"

Curiously, in Portuguese we have "espelunca" which is more commonly used as a synonym for a seedy, shady place -- and now I know why!

[lrhegeba]

in german "Spelunke" is used for a seedy, shady bar

[cstrahan]

And another fun bit of trivia: in the animated series “The Seven Deadly Sins”, one of the characters owns and operates a somewhat suspicious bar in a remote mountain cave.

Seems there may be a cross-culture notion of caves and sketchy bars having similar level of… ah, “shadiness”. Makes some sense, as I’m typing this out. The dark is where (both literally and figuratively) shady things go down, and it’s hard to get much darker than a cave, so “Spelunke” seems a fitting name.

[Jaksla92]

Same case for "spelunka" in polish