Font-de-Gaume cave

Font-de-Gaume holds some of the finest polychrome paintings of the Ice Age, often ranked second only to Lascaux. A narrow corridor runs deep into a limestone hillside above the little Beune valley, just outside Les Eyzies, and its walls carry more than two hundred figures painted and engraved by Magdalenian hunters around 17,000 years ago. Bison dominate, more than eighty of them, rendered in red, brown and black with engraved contours that give their humped bodies weight and roundness; around them move horses, mammoths, reindeer, ibex and even a woolly rhinoceros. Among the best-loved images is a tender scene of a male reindeer licking the forehead of a female.

The cave mouth was known to local people long before anyone noticed what lay inside. On 12 September 1901 the village schoolmaster Denis Peyrony, who days earlier had seen the engravings of nearby Les Combarelles with the prehistorian Henri Breuil, recognised the paintings for what they were. Breuil went on to copy the figures by hand, and his drawings made Font-de-Gaume one of the foundations of the study of Palaeolithic art at a time when many scholars still doubted that prehistoric people could paint. The cave continued to give up its secrets: its celebrated frieze of five bison was revealed only in 1966, when the walls were being cleaned, and in 2026 researchers obtained the first direct radiocarbon dates for painted figures in the Dordogne from traces of charcoal hidden in its black pigments.

Font-de-Gaume belongs to the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. Les Eyzies itself, a village tucked beneath overhanging cliffs where the Beune meets the Vézère, calls itself the world capital of prehistory: the first Cro-Magnon skeletons were found here in 1868, and the National Museum of Prehistory is built into the rock shelter above the village. Les Combarelles, Abri Cap-Blanc and a string of other painted caves and shelters lie within a few kilometres.

Getting there

The cave lies about 1 km east of Les Eyzies, in the Vézère valley of the Dordogne. The nearest larger city is Périgueux, about 37 km to the north, and the nearest airport is Brive–Vallée de la Dordogne (BVE), about 38 km to the east. Les Eyzies has its own station on the regional railway line between Périgueux and Agen, within walking distance of the cave.