In order to investigate the dynamics of the vortex cavitation, which is found to be responsible of the cavitation erosion in hydraulic machinery, a cavitation vortex generator (CVG) is used. By producing the cyclic growth and collapse of cavitation vortex, this device provides a good simulation of the realistic hydrodynamics situation corresponding to the travelling cavities downstream a fixed leading-edge cavity. The simultaneous use of the shock and the pressure time-history recordings and the high speed Cranz-Schardin visualizations allows us to describe the instantaneous cavity motion in the CVG test section . The most important result is the evidence of a strong spherica1 shock waves emission at the time of the cavitation vortex collapse, leading to overpressure of more than 10 kbar.