The Lascaux II Caves

There are lots of caves here in the Perigord but the most famous of them all is Lascaux.  The caves were discovered in 1940 and opened to the public for about 15 years before being closed due to the the carbon dioxide damage from all the visitors.

In the 80s, Lascaux II opened for visitors - a full and precise fascimile of the original caves.  It reminded me a little of the Ramses II temples we visited in Abu Simbel, which had been laboriously dismantled and moved to an alternate location to save them from the Aswan High Dam flooding.

Lascaux was also the name of a basement French restaurant in San Francisco in the early '90s, on Sutter St, where my husband and I went to dinner when we were still dating!

Lascaux turned out to be very different from the caves we visited at Nerja, Spain last summer.  It was a very small cramped space but the paintings were beautiful and remarkably lifelike, with the contours of the cave walls being used to enhance the animal bodies and a real sense of movement.  Considering our Cro-Magnon ancestors were using saliva and earth pigments, and burning animal fat for light - their achievement seems even more extraordinary.  The photos you see don't do it justice.

Note - you can't buy tickets at the Lascaux site.  You have to buy them in the town of Montignac first and their website is a big old mess of flash and sound, but with no discernibly useful info.  Our trip involved driving back and forth and a spectacular .5 km sprint to get us to the cave just 10 mins late for the one and only English tour of the day!