Lascaux Cave

Lascaux holds the most celebrated Ice Age paintings in the world. The cave opens into a wooded hillside above the Vézère valley near Montignac in the Dordogne, and its walls and ceilings carry some six hundred painted figures and around fifteen hundred engravings, made by Magdalenian hunters roughly 17,000 to 22,000 years ago. The animals — aurochs, horses, deer, bison and big cats — are drawn with astonishing confidence, using the bulges and hollows of the rock to give them volume and movement.

The first chamber, the Hall of the Bulls, is dominated by a procession of great black aurochs, one of them about 5.2 metres long, the largest animal figure known in cave art. Beyond it, the narrow Axial Diverticulum carries cows and horses painted across its walls and ceiling. Deeper in, the Apse is covered with more than a thousand engravings, and at the bottom of a shaft lies the most enigmatic image of all: a stick-like man with a bird's head, the only human figure in the cave.

The cave was found on 12 September 1940 by eighteen-year-old Marcel Ravidat and three friends, who slipped in through a hole left by an uprooted tree. Opened to the public in 1948, it drew so many visitors — up to twelve hundred a day — that their breath and the lighting began to damage the paintings, and it was closed in 1963; since then only a handful of specialists have been allowed inside, while mould and fungal growth have been fought for decades. To share the art without harming it, a partial replica, Lascaux II, was opened nearby in 1983, followed by a touring exhibition, and in December 2016 by Lascaux IV, the International Centre for Cave Art, a building by Snøhetta set into the foot of the same hill, containing a near-complete facsimile reproduced from 3D scans to within a millimetre. The cave is part of the Vézère valley World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1979.

Getting there

Lascaux and its replica centre Lascaux IV are on the edge of Montignac, in the Vézère valley of the Périgord Noir. The nearest large town is Brive-la-Gaillarde, about 31 km away, and Brive–Vallée de la Dordogne Airport (BVE) is about 25 km away. From Brive the practical way on is by car or taxi. The original cave is not open to visitors; what you visit is the replica at Lascaux IV.