The Most Beautiful Places in the Dordogne
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in the Dordogne are La Roque-Gageac, Lascaux Cave and Les Combarelles. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Dordogne, the old province of Périgord, is limestone country. Its rivers, the Dordogne and the Vézère, have cut deep valleys lined with cliffs, overhangs and caves, and for tens of thousands of years those shelters drew people. That is why the Vézère valley holds one of the richest concentrations of Ice Age art anywhere, recognised by UNESCO in 1979, and why the town of Les Eyzies gave its name to the Cro-Magnon people found there in 1868. Later centuries added fortified villages and châteaux on the same cliffs.
Lascaux Cave, found by four teenagers in 1940, holds the painted Hall of the Bulls, made around seventeen thousand years ago. Font-de-Gaume, near Les Eyzies, preserves rare polychrome paintings of bison, horses and mammoths, while Les Combarelles is a narrow gallery covered in hundreds of engraved figures, among them animals and human-like faces. Together they show the range of Palaeolithic art: painted, engraved, monumental and intimate.
Above ground, La Roque-Gageac is pressed between the Dordogne river and a sheer cliff, with remains of a troglodyte fort cut into the rock face above its roofs. Across the water, the Gardens of Marqueyssac run along a high spur with walks of clipped box shaped into rounded forms and views over the valley and its castles. Caves, gardens and a village on the river show how closely people here have lived with the stone.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | La Roque-Gageac | Most beautiful village | |
| 2 | Lascaux Cave | Cave | ✓ |
| 3 | Les Combarelles | Show cave | ✓ |
| 4 | Font-de-Gaume cave | Show cave | ✓ |
| 5 | Gardens of Marqueyssac | Historic garden |
01 La Roque-Gageac
France44.826° N 1.183° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Manfred Heyde · CC BY-SA 3.0 La Roque-Gageac is built into its cliff, not just below it.
Did you know? The name joins the Occitan word for rock or stronghold with Gageac, from a Gallo-Roman estate of a man named Gaius.
02 Lascaux Cave
Grotte de Lascaux
France · 30.5 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde45.054° N 1.171° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Eline13Viki+ · CC0 Lascaux holds the most celebrated Ice Age paintings in the world.
Did you know? Some colours were not brushed at all but sprayed, blown through a tube onto the rock, while others were dabbed on with pads.
03 Les Combarelles
Grotte des Combarelles I
France44.944° N 1.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Sémhur · CC BY-SA 3.0 Les Combarelles is not a cave of great halls and painted ceilings.
04 Font-de-Gaume cave
Grotte de Font-de-Gaume
France44.935° N 1.029° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Traumrune · CC BY-SA 3.0 Font-de-Gaume holds some of the finest polychrome paintings of the Ice Age, often ranked second only to Lascaux.
Did you know? Font-de-Gaume was among the first painted caves found in the Périgord.
05 Gardens of Marqueyssac
Jardins de Marqueyssac
France44.824° N 1.163° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 Some 150,000 box shrubs, more than a century old and clipped by hand into soft, rolling mounds, cover a rocky spur high above the Dordogne, and walking among them feels like crossing a green sea frozen mid-swell.
Did you know? Between 1830 and 1840 an earlier owner added a chapel and a 100-metre alley laid out for horseback rides.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in the Dordogne?
- On our list, La Roque-Gageac ranks first, followed by Lascaux Cave and Les Combarelles.
- Why are there so many prehistoric caves in the Dordogne?
- The region is made of limestone, which rivers and groundwater have hollowed into caves and rock shelters. These gave Palaeolithic people shelter and wall surfaces for art, and many were preserved under sediment until modern times.
- Who discovered Lascaux Cave?
- Lascaux was found in September 1940 by four teenagers led by Marcel Ravidat near Montignac. The archaeologist Henri Breuil studied the paintings soon afterwards.
- How old are the paintings in Lascaux?
- They date from the Upper Palaeolithic and are generally estimated at around seventeen thousand years old.
- What kinds of places are there to see in the Dordogne?
- In our collection, the places in the Dordogne are most often caves (3), show caves (2), archaeological sites (2) and historic gardens (1).
- How many places are on this list in the Dordogne?
- The list covers 5 places.