Lascaux (the original) is a 1.5km long cave system where 17000 years ago an individual or group of Cro-Magnon people covered the walls and ceilings with paintings and drawings. Cro-Magnon were the first homo-sapiens.
The Lascaux (lass-coo, rhymes with two) cave was rediscover in 1940 by some boys searching for their lost dog. The paintings were perfectly preserved because the cave system had been sealed off from the surrounding environment for all that time. Opened to the public in 1948, it was a huge draw card from day one. It was nearly loved to death. The paintings quickly began to deteriorate due to humidity, light and fungal growth. The cave has been closed to visitors since 1963, and with any luck this will preserve the paintings for another 17000 years.
In the 1980s a project was started to recreate the most important parts of the cave system to allow visitors to once again wonder at the paintings. After 11 years of painstaking scientific reseach Lascaux II was opened to the public. The recreation is physcially accurate to plus or minus 1cm. The recreation of the paintings was done by rediscovering the materials, techniques and tools used to create the orginals. While Lascaux II is basically a tourist site, it is first and foremost an interpretive museum.
The paintings are so sophisticated given they were painted 17,000 years ago. The artist(s) have even used the shape of the rock walls to give volume or a 3D effect to the paintings. They used a pallet of 13 colours. Many of the paintings show movement and have perspective.
The primary subject of the paintings are bulls. Horses are the second most common subject.
In the darkness of the cave with just the guide torch to highlight the paintings the questions come to our minds with a flood. Why? How? What purpose? Who? Your guess is a good as anybody's.
The paintings are huge some up to 5m x 3m. There appears to be no practice or reworking. The whole cave system has over 300 major paintings. The whole thing looks like it was conceived and painted as a whole not just the result of random additions. The cave is effectively the Sistine Chapel of Cro-Magnon man. There is no real evidence of human habitation in the cave.
Theses photos are not from Lascaux II but from Le Thot, which is a more tourist, less museum, site about 7km away. The cave sections and paintings have been recreated in the same way by the same technicians and artists that worked on Lascaux II. Le Thot was sort of a practice for Lascaux II. We can not take photos of the real paintings (copyright) but they are so much better than you see here, we hope to keep them in our photographic mind forever.
Needless to say the demand for the 2000 tickets a day on offer to visit Lascaux II is huge. the middle of August is like the peak of peak season. The tickets are not on sale at the site, but in the village of Montignac 2km away. Tickets go on sale at 9.00am and you better not be late otherwise you've had a drive for nothing. Guided tours (the only way to visit) lasting about 40 minutes are given in French, English and German.
The drive from Chauzauand to Montignac takes 50 minutes along country roads and through sleeply little villages. Well they would be sleepy because we are motoring through them well before 8.00am. The only places open at that hour of the day are the newsagent (Tabac) and the boulangerie (the bakery).
We arrive in Montignac on a very cool (10C) and sunny morning. The town is dressed for a festival. It must be a fairly signifant festival, judging by the amount of work gone into decorating the streets, civic buildings, shops, parks, gardens, round-abouts and homes.
Montignac with all it's decoration has gone off the scale of cuteness.
We arrived in town at 8.15 and it is pretty well empty. There is a choice of car parks to be had in Place Bertran de Born next to the Tourist Info Centre, where the Lascaux tickets go on sale at 9.00am. There is already one man in the queue. We wander around a little, take some photos, try to buy a take away coffee (no luck) and then join the queue as third in line.
By 9.00 the queue is 20 or so people long. The car park is now full of cars. Cars, motorhomes and caravans are circulating through the narrow, one way streets hoping for a park. You sense a general rush of people towards the ticket office as we head back to our car. The first English tour is 11.00am.
With the best part of 2 hours to kill we drive out to Le Thot. They don't open until 10.00.
Since we arrived in Montignac a dense fog has been slowly descending and the air is cooling rapidly. Visibility is down to just a few hundred metres.
Getting back through Montignac to Lascaux II is a challenge. The French holiday masses have awoken from their slumber and are on the move. The ticket queue is now several lanes long and the streets blocked with cars trying to get to the queue.
Lascaux blows our mind and sparks an interest and conversation that may last for years.
