Guide to prehistoric cave art in France

Dana Facaros explores some of France’s most glorious cave art, richly painted and engraved snapshots of daily life thousands of years ago. Time travel and discover France’s first masterpieces in this guide to prehistoric cave art in France.

For over 20,000 years, they scrambled through pitch black corridors, sometimes on all fours, with only lamps of mammoth fat or resin torches to light their way. Using their fingers, pieces of flint, pigment (clay ochres, iron oxide, manganese oxide and charcoal), moss and twigs, they created extraordinary works of art. It’s hard to get your head around France’s earliest artists. Questions are endless, answers only speculation. They not only understood perspective, but accomplished many of the aims of contemporary art— unbound by rules, suggesting rather than showing, inviting viewers to participate in the meaning, using natural features to add depth and dynamism. When Picasso visited Lascaux, he could only say ‘We have invented nothing’.

Time travel to France’s first masterpieces

France’s grottes ornées are intensely moving, magical, uncanny— and fragile. To be among the few allowed inside you nearly always need to book in advance. For some caves, perfectly preserved because they were sealed up by rockslides, we can only visit replicas—but they are breath-taking, copied to the millimetre. As they say, ‘Impossible is not a French word!’ Here’s a round-up of the best.

Lascaux (Montignac, Dordogne)

Vacuum-sealed until it was discovered in 1940 but kept secret until the end of the war, this ‘Sistine Chapel of Prehistoric Art’ (21,000 BC) is one of the few polychrome painted caves ever discovered. It didn’t take long for the breath of thousands of visitors to start to destroy the art, and such was the universal disappointment that the French invented the cave replica industry. The latest facsimile opened in 2016 as part of the International Centre for Cave Art, which makes a great introduction to the field.

Font de Gaume (Les Eyzies, Dordogne)

Just 22km down the Vézère River (UNESCO World Heritage’s ‘Valley of Prehistory’) you’ll find Font de Gaume. This jewel was always open, but was only ‘discovered’ in 1901, after numerous other finds of bones and tools in local caves compelled ‘experts’ to admit that cave art wasn’t an elaborate hoax. In Font de Gaume, Magdalenian-era artists (14,000 BC) left a magnificent polychrome painted frieze of bison, along with horses and a unique, exquisitely tender scene, of a stag leaning over to lick a doe’s brow.

Grotte des Combarelles (Les Eyzies)

It was a similar story at the Grotte de Combarelles—the caves are so close they even share the same ticket office— and the engravings of horses, bison, mammoths, and lions are exceptional. Vestiges of colour suggest these were painted, too, but only the engravings have survived.

Chauvet (Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche)

In 1994, three amateur speleologists wiggled into a cave that had been sealed up by a rockslide 21,500 years ago and found ‘humanity’s oldest masterpiece,’ an astonishing 18,000 years older than Lascaux. Its Aurignacian-era artists filled it with herds of exquisitely depicted horses and lions (especially) but also rhinoceroses, bison, reindeer, and even an owl. Werner Herzog was allowed inside to film his 3-D Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) but that was it. But on a nearby hill, in a building that looks like a pie pan, you can visit the world’s largest cave replica, Chauvet 2. Book the last slot of the day, so you can linger until they throw you out. I could have stayed all night.

Pech Merle (Cabrerets, Lot)

Sealed up 12,000 years ago, and re-discovered in 1922, Pech Merle combines natural cave beauty (and rare cave pearls) and drawings, the oldest of which go back 30,000 years. Highlights include the 7m ‘black frieze’ of 25 animals, the wounded man, and a pair of extraordinary larger than life spotted horses, surrounded by yearning negative hand prints. Perhaps most moving are the footprints left by a child long, long ago.

Niaux (Niaux, Ariège)

High in a cliff, with an entrance marked by a spectacular steel prow, the most beautiful grotte ornée in the Pyrenees is another cave that was always open for centuries (hence the graffiti), until its art was ‘discovered’ in 1906. Nothing has changed since, and you’ll need to walk with a torch over uneven surface for 1.6km, passing black and red symbols that seem full of forgotten meaning. At the end is the superb, vaulted Salle Noir, which feels like a sanctuary, covered with 70 stunning charcoal drawings of animals from 15-14,000 BC.

Rouffignac (Rouffignac-Saint-Cernin-de-Reilhac, Dordogne)

Curiously, the fact that the walls of this massive cave (grottederoufignac.fr) 10km from Les Eyzies were decorated with ‘beasts’ was described back in 1575, yet only in 1956 was it confirmed that there were priceless Magdalenian works from 11,000 BC. Nicknamed the ‘Cave of a Hundred Mammoths’, you’ll ride an electric train for 4km to the best of the art. There are actually 158 woolly mammoths, engraved and outlined in magnesium oxide, which researchers say came from 450km away in Saône-et-Loire.

Cosquer (Marseille)

In 1985, Henri Cosquer was scuba diving in the limestone calanques near Marseille, and 35m down, noticed a crevice in the rock, and swam up to explore—discovering a cave frequented between 33-19,000 BC, back when sea level was 120m lower, beautifully decorated with the Ice Age animals, and uniquely, a giant prehistoric penguin. Since then, sea levels have risen further. But we can have a look at what he discovered at Cosquer Méditerranée, the replica built next to Marseille’s Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean, where you descend into a watery world and board a little boat. It’s a bit Disneyland-ish, but good fun.

Cussac (Le Buisson-de-Cadouin, Dordogne)

In 2000, chef and speleologist Marc Delluc felt a give-away current of air on Cussac hill from a pile of rocks—which had blocked the entrance to a cave 30,000 years ago. Delluc cleared a path and found what was soon dubbed the ‘Lascaux of etchings’ for its fluid drawings of horses, bison, and a tiny headed woman with an enormous bottom. Unusually, it also contained human skeletons in the wallows formed by hibernating bears. Too fragile to open to the public, in October 2024 a Centre d’Interprétation opened in Le Buisson-de-Cadouin with copies of the sepulchres and some of the etchings.

Dana Facaros has lived in France for over 30 years. She is the creator of French Food Decoder app: everything you want to know about French food, and co-author of the Bradt guide to Gascony & the Pyrenees and many guide books to France.