As we quickly learnt, the Dordogne is home to some of the oldest and most renowned prehistoric cave paintings in the world and after some initial research, we narrowed down our choices to two that seemed to provide the best and most memorable experiences – Grotte de Font-de-Gaume and Grotte de Rouffignac.

Grotte de Font-de-Gaume

Grotte de Font-de-Gaume is the last cave in Europe with prehistoric multicoloured painting still open to the public. It was listed as World Heritage with UNESCO in 1979, and is located on the outskirts of Les Eyzies. This prehistoric cave is renowned as one of the most incredible Palaeolithic sites in the world still open to the public.

We arrived at the ticket booth to buy tickets at 8am, despite it not opening until 9:30am, and we were still about sixth or so in line! Part of the reason for getting there early to buy tickets is that they no longer take reservations in advance so you have to be there in person to buy tickets, plus they have restricted the numbers to 80 people each day to try and ensure the longevity of the paintings. The fact it was so difficult to see, combined with what it hid within its walls, make it a fairly popular attraction!

We purchased tickets for the 1030am tour (the earlier one already sold out!), and then nipped off to buy tickets for the Grotte de Rouffignac which was only a short drive away. We arrived in good time to purchase 3pm tickets and then headed back to Font-de-Gaume for our tour.

Discovered in 1901, the front of the cave looks like a door opening, and it is not until you get inside that you realise how historically important and amazing the discoveries inside are.

More than 200 images painted or engraved representations of bison, horses, mammoths and reindeer, are visible, dating back to the Magdalenian period, which let’s get this straight – is between 17,000 and 20,000 years ago!

The paintings are particularly amazing for the way that they have been painted to suit the natural curvature of the rocks and walls – the bump in stone might be the stomach of a bison, or the mane of a horse… but they did it all literally, thousands of years ago… it was really quite humbling to be in there and consider that at some point these ancestors of ours had sought shelter in this cave and done these paintings of the wild beasts all around them. CRAZY.

I really enjoyed this tour and would highly recommend it – and soon! Our guide was telling us that although they have reduced the tourist numbers to 80 a day max, the impact of human breathing on the paintings is negative so they are looking at closing it off to the public forever, maybe doing a replica similar to the Lascaux caves. I was so glad we got to see it firsthand, who knows how much longer everyday people (not historians) will have the opportunity to see these amazing remnants of civilisations long gone by.

Les Eyzies

Following Font de Gaumme we pulled into the small cliff side village of Les Eyzies, home to some more prehistoric caves and drawings – in fact, a slogan on their tourist website reads ‘Les Eyzies – the place our ancestors called home’ – quite the drawcard huh?

We had worked hard to narrow down the caves we would be seeing so we were not officially in Les Eyzies to see more sites, we were there for lunch! The village was pretty small and based along the river with homes built into the cliff face, some of them looked quite precarious but if they’ve lasted centuries, I am sure they’ll last a few more decades.

We swung into a gorgeous looking local brasserie where the clientele was 95% locals and French tourists. Besides us and an annoying older American couple (the husband kept saying how he hated French food, and would much prefer an American burger and fries – blasphemous!), everyone else spoke fluent French so we battled through our basic language skills to order the waiter’s recommendation with a couple of glasses of vino, always a good choice!

With tummies full, and starting to feel abit tired, we headed for Grotte de Rouffignac, the next stop on our ‘caves and history’ tour!

Grotte de Rouffignac

Grotte de Rouffignac has been referenced for centuries but appears it was forgotten, and only rediscovered in 1956 when two prehistorians from the Pyrenees, rediscovered and confirmed the cave art for which it is famous. Interestingly, during the Second World War the cave served as a hide-out for the French Résistance. In 1959 the cave was officially opened for visitors. It was classified a world heritage site in 1979 by the UNESCO and unusually is under private ownership.

As with Font de Gaume, the entry to Grotte de Rouffignac is quite non-descript and if you accidently stumbled across it, you would not think it were anything too interesting.

However, enter inside its low roof and suddenly you will be transported into a deep cave system with more than eight kilometres of underground passageways (that have been accessed, who knows how many more that are currently undiscovered!).

For our tour, we jumped aboard an electric train which followed a basic railway through the cave system to about 2 kilometres deep within the mountainside, and listened to the interesting commentary by our guide. We learnt that that there are ten natural shafts that led to deeper levels. So far, a further four kilometers of passage ways have been explored in this deeper level. Below the deeper level exists a bottom level with a small underground rivulet.

The plan of the cave reveals a non-random pattern that shows passageways organised along certain preferred directions. Estimates put the cave formation about 3 to 2 million (yep, million!) years ago. We learnt that millennia ago, water infiltrated the bedrock along certain zones of weakness and dissolved the limestone. Today this process has come to an end, and the cave is mostly dry except for the rivulet along the base level so it is unlikely to continue eroding.

As we travelled along on the train, our guide pointed out scratch marks on the walls that were made by cave bears, we could also visibly make out their (large, these were big creatures!) resting places along the walls where they would circle around and around like a dog flattening the grass before it lay down.

Before too long, we reached the pinnacle of the tour, the huge cavern with over 225 identifed drawings, mostly engravings and black contouring, but equally as impressive, if not more so, due to the size and scale of them. Many were drawn onto the roof of the cavern, which was only a metre or so above our heads, and they included 158 mammoths (70% of the drawings were mammoths, so you can assume these babies featured pretty heavily in their lives); 28 bisons; 15 horses; 12 capricorns; 10 woolly rhinoceros, a single cave bear and some humans thrown in for good measure.

We really enjoyed the sense of history that we uncovered in our cave tours, and I can only reiterate how phenomenal it was to see these drawings from thousands and thousands of years ago, and really consider that the people who lived then were not, as we often imagine them, neanderthals with no sense of beauty or skill. They were artists in their own right -discoverers and adventurers (sure, they were probably hiding out the ice age in a cave that gave them shelter, but still!) – people who made a meaningful impact on the way we live today, and whom millions of people visit their works of art every year. Mind-blowing stuff.