French caves

Ted. With more than 1,000 caves, subterranean tourism is a big deal in France. Most caves have the typical stalagmites and stalactites but some have prehistoric drawings and etchings. 

The most famous are in the south and quite a few of those are in Périgord, including the grandaddy of them all - Lascaux. 

Judy and I thought that we should visit at least one while we were in the area. We skipped Lascaux because you can’t actually enter the cave anymore. Humans transmit fungi and other bad things that can ultimately destroy the art works so, at Lascaux, you can only tour a fiberglass replica cave. That, plus the crowds, chose us to visit another cave. 

Tickets to the caves are always limited because admittance is restricted for the reason I mentioned above. We finally ended up choosing the cave at Les Combarelles. It is a smaller cave there are only a couple of tours each day (in French) for a maximum of seven people each time. That seemed about our speed. 

From the road, Les Combarelles just looked like small farm house, which is exactly what it used to be. The old house now serves as an office and the cave entrance used to be a horse barn. 

There were only three of us on the tour and our friendly guide, Stephanie repeated some key points in English if we looked confused. 

With Stephanie

We were told that there are about 600 drawings in this cave, ranging in age from 13,000 to 15,000 years old. We saw a wooly mammoth and rhinoceros, a cave lion, a cave bear and other mammals plus a few rare human images and a child’s handprint.

I found these sketches on the internet which reproduction some of the etchings.

Of course, we all have the same question; why were they drawn? It felt like a sacred space so maybe that had something to do with it. 

No photography is allowed inside the cave but I grabbed these images from the internet.