Les Combarelles

Les Combarelles is not a cave of great halls and painted ceilings. It is a narrow, winding passage, on average about a metre wide, cut through the limestone by an underground stream, and its walls carry one of the major collections of engraved Ice Age images in Europe: more than 600 figures scratched and incised into the rock by Magdalenian hunters. Traces of pigment show that many were once coloured; the damp air of the passage has long since washed the paint away, leaving only the lines.

What you see, lit at close range as you move along the corridor, is a crowded bestiary. Horses dominate, alone and in groups, but there are reindeer, ibex, mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, bears, big cats and a few bovids, often overlapping so that one animal's back becomes another's leg. The reindeer are the ones people remember: drawn with an observer's accuracy, some of them lower their heads as if to drink. Set apart from this realism are around fifty strange, schematic human-like figures and a scatter of signs, including the roof-shaped marks known as tectiforms, whose meaning is still argued over.

The entrance porch had been dug by Émile Rivière in the 1890s, and local farmers had long used it as a stable, but the main decorated gallery was only recognised on 8 September 1901 by Denis Peyrony, Louis Capitan and Henri Breuil — four days before the same team found the painted cave of Font-de-Gaume nearby. Coming at a moment when many scholars still doubted that Palaeolithic people could produce real art, the discovery helped settle the argument. The main gallery was protected as a historic monument in 1902, and since 1979 the cave has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing of the prehistoric sites and decorated caves of the Vézère valley. A further decorated section, Combarelles III, was identified at the far end of the gallery in 2005, bringing the passage to about 300 metres.

To protect the engravings, visits are made in very small guided groups.

Getting there

The cave lies on the D47 in the small valley of the Beune, about 2.5 km upstream of the village of Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne; Font-de-Gaume is a little over a kilometre away. The nearest city is Périgueux, about 37 km away, and the nearest airport is Brive–Souillac (BVE), about 37 km away.