After five years of innovative and ingenious civil engineering, the ATLAS detector cavern (35 x 55 x 40 metres) was fully excavated. ATLAS, CERN officials, and political authorities, including the President of the Swiss Confederation Pascal Couchepin, celebrated the inauguration of the first cavern on the Large Hadron Collider on 4 June 2003. Installation of the detector in the cavern began soon after.