This sheer, wild, 80-metre cliff dropping straight down into the River Vézère hides, almost secretly, a wonder of nature and a treasure of civilisation. Geological traces and man’s touching imprints mingle at this outstanding UNESCO World Heritage site. As you climb higher, space and time become one, from the Paleolithic Age to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The kitchen, places of worship an...
Musée national de Préhistoire
EYZIES-DE-TAYAC-SIREUIL
The Musée National des Eyzies is at the centre of the world's biggest concentration of sites occupied and embellished by mankind. This exceptional, incomparable and universal treasure bears witness to the birth of a civilisation: our own. Far from the first bipeds that left Africa to survive, Man in the Vézère valley took the time to dream. They invented symbolic thought; their sculptures attest t...
Grottes de Font-de-Gaume et des Combarelles
EYZIES-DE-TAYAC-SIREUIL
Font-de-Gaume Cave houses over 200 painted and engraved works of cave art from the Magdalenian Period, arranged into a composition and even scenes along an approximately 125m network. This particularly rich, varied bestiary features perfectly identifiable bison, horses, reindeer and mammoths. The last cave with polychrome paintings open to the public....
Grotte du Sorcier
SAINT-CIRQ
The Grotte du Sorcier (Sorcerer's Cave), discovered in 1952, was decorated by prehistoric men between 17,000 and 19,000 BC. It is in a cliff overlooking the village of Saint-Cirq and the Vézère Valley. Stone Age artists engraved geometric shapes, animals (bison, horses, ibexes) and depictions of humans – extremely rare in cave art – on the walls and ceilings. One of the human figures is world famo...
Abri du Cap Blanc et du Poisson
MARQUAY
L’Abri de Cap Blanc boasts one of the greatest masterpieces of upper Palaeolithic monumental sculpture (approximately 15,000 years ago) still accessible to the public. The most commonly depicted animal is the horse, of which there are eight figures, including one over two metres long, in the middle of a frieze featuring bison and cervids. A museum gives visitors an overview of prehistoric man's da...
Gisement de Laugerie-Haute et autres gisements préhistoriques
EYZIES-DE-TAYAC-SIREUIL
The stratification of the Laugerie-Haute site, one of the Vézère Valley's biggest prehistoric shelters, bears witness to over 10,000 years of human settlement. Accompanied by a guide, visitors explore the various archaeological levels where major artefacts attesting to life in prehistoric times have been found, some of which are on display at the National Prehistory Museum in Les Eyzies. A few kil...
Gisement du Régourdou
MONTIGNAC
Visitors to the prehistoric site of Régourdou, a listed historic monument 800m above the Lascaux caves, can learn about the various periods of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man. The 45mn guided tour takes you around the deposit and the pothole through a park where six bears live, and to the museum, where you can see a Neanderthal tomb that has been unearthed by archaeologists. The film The Old Man an...
Village troglodytique de la Madeleine
TURSAC
This outstanding natural site has drawn people from prehistoric times to the present. The Magdalenian Period, when semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers settled here 17,000 years ago, was named after this prehistoric deposit at the foot of a rock shelter on the banks of the Vézère. A cave village built by prehistoric men, inhabited from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, is halfway up the cliff. Th...
