The first piece of good news we got this morning is that we didn't have to try and exchange our Hertz car today. Phew - I was budgeting a few hours to try and make the change since we would have likely needed to go up to Bergerac.
So we headed off to Les Eyzies in the late morning and had a nice lunch while looking up at the statue of Cro-Magnon man next to the buildings set into the rock. Not a very pretty town and apparently a zoo in the summer. I'd give it a miss.
After lunch we took a little detour to La Madeleine, a troglodyte village in the Vezère valley. Troglodyte refers to a prehistoric race of people that lived in caves, dens, or holes. We didn't really mean to spend 40 minutes here, but the sign from the main road looked promising. The most beautiful building in the little village was this petite church built into the rock. There were even gothic arches inside.
After that, we headed over to
La Roque de St. Christophe, another very impressive troglodyte village where up to 1,000 people lived back in the medieval days. It's interesting that cro-magnon man picked particular sites, and they were reused much later by people in the middle ages. A good and defensible site is hard to find!
Finally, here's a recreation of what the whole village in the rock might have looked like.
There are a total of 5 terraces, although not all are currently accessible. It was a lot of fun tramping around the caves though, and they did a great job of describing how each cave might have been set up, so you could really picture it.
What an educational day!
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