Chauvet Cave

High in a limestone cliff above the Ardèche gorges, a cave sealed by a rockfall for tens of thousands of years holds some of the oldest and finest figurative paintings ever made. When three cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, squeezed into it in December 1994, they found walls covered with animals drawn in charcoal and red ochre. Radiocarbon dating has since placed most of the black drawings around 36,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian period, when the first modern humans were spreading across Europe. In 2014 the cave was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

What sets Chauvet apart is not only its age but its daring. The painters chose animals that rarely appear in other Ice Age caves: cave lions, woolly rhinoceroses, bears, a leopard, a hyena, alongside horses, bison and mammoths, with well over a dozen species in all. They scraped the rock clean before working, so that figures stand out on a pale ground, and they used shading, layered outlines and the natural relief of the walls to give the animals volume and movement. Several panels read as scenes rather than catalogues: two rhinos clash horns, a pride of lions seems to stalk its prey, and a frieze of horse heads overlaps as if in motion. Hand stencils, red dots and a fragmentary female figure fused with a bison head add to the sense of a place charged with meaning.

The floor is as remarkable as the walls. Because a cliff collapse closed the entrance, the cave kept its last moments intact: skulls of cave bears and the hollows where they hibernated, their claw marks, the scattered charcoal of torches, and the footprints of a child who walked through the galleries thousands of years after the main phase of painting. To spare this fragile world, the paintings are shared with the public through a full-scale facsimile, the Caverne du Pont-d'Arc, opened in 2015 a short distance away on the plateau. Werner Herzog's 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) carried the images to a worldwide audience.

Getting there

The cave lies near the village of Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, close to the natural rock arch of Pont d'Arc at the head of the Ardèche gorges. The nearest sizeable town is Bagnols-sur-Cèze, about 30 km to the south-east. The nearest airport is Nîmes-Arles-Camargue (FNI), about 70 km away; there is no railway in the gorges, so the last stretch is by road.