Let's Go to Lascaux

We had the usual great breakfast at Les Cordeliers.

Fine china and even wine glasses for the O.J. make everything taste better

Our activity today was to visit Lascaux IV, the latest replica of the authentic Lascaux cave. The cave was discovered in 1940 by some schoolboys. After the war, the cave was opened to the public, but closed in the 60s because the hordes of visitors were changing the air inside and causing the cave paintings to deteriorate. There is also a Lascaux II and a Lascaux III, II being not as precise as the new IV, and III being a traveling exhibit. I had tried, without success, to book an English tour for us online. Our host, Chris, offered to get online and do it for us. He said the website was very confusing, and hard to navigate, and I agree. So, we were booked for the English tour at 4:30, thanks to our kind host.

After breakfast we decided to walk through town and see a few of the notable sites.

The indoor market, held daily in a building that was once a church, then a gunpowder factory, then a post office, before becoming the market. The large doors weigh 7 tons each.

The Lanterne des Morts (Lantern of the Dead) is the oldest monument in town, dating from 1147. Built out of gratitude for the end of a plague that killed 1,000 of the 4,000 inhabitants.

One of several Foie Gras shops in town

The weather was nice, so we decided to visit the Troglodyte caves of La Roque Saint-Christophe before our tour of Lascaux IV. Said to have been occupied from 55,000 years ago up until the Renaissance in 1588, when it was destroyed in the religious wars, the settlement was situated 300 feet above the River Vezere, protecting the inhabitants from marauding Norsemen. According to Rick Steves' description, instead of ending prayers with just "amen", prayers in those days ended with "deliver us from the Norsemen, amen."

Early inhabitants probably lived within the shelter of the rock walls, with nothing but dirt floors. But depictions of later inhabitants showed how they had built walls on the open side of the rock, closing in the living spaces, and looking like more modern half-timbered buildings. The village was on 5 different levels, with evidence of storage nooks carved into the stone, and places where they would have tied animals up. There was a chapel. I wondered how the children would be kept from falling off the cliff, and obviously, later in their history, the walls would have kept them safe, but I still wonder about the early dwellers.

A series of pulleys helped get provisions, and sometimes animals, up to the settlement

Tools, ladders, and remnants of stone pillars and building blocks on display

One level of the troglodyte dwelling

A mock-up of what the settlement probably looked like 

After our self-guided tour, we headed out to find lunch. We ended up in the village of Montignac, and ate along the river at Les Pilotis Montignac. The food was good, and the view was nice. There were lots of locals out for their Sunday lunch.

Enjoying lunch along the river on a sunny Sunday

Of course I couldn't pass up a chance to have Café Gourmand for dessert!

After a leisurely lunch we headed to Lascaux, just a short drive from Montignac. We met our guide for the tour and headed into the replica cave - Lascaux IV. Once you're inside, it's hard to believe this is a totally man-made cave. Using modern technology, this latest replica is as close to the original cave as possible, definitely more accurate than the previous attempts. The paintings were all animals and symbols. The question of why no pictures of people is one that historians ponder. No landscapes. No sun, moon, stars. No weapons. It's interesting that it's just animals, and that seems to be the case with other cave paintings discovered in the area too. Nonetheless, the paintings were brightly colored, well-defined, depictions of some of the animals of the time. I read somewhere that though reindeer was a big part of their diet at that time, there don't seem to be reindeer pictured here. The museum, and short videos and exhibits were well done and interesting, and our headsets narrated the videos in English. Very high-tech. Ricardo and Marco checked out the virtual tour of the caves, and enjoyed it. The kids probably all love that part too.

We weren't allowed to take photos inside the cave, but the museum had life-size sections of copies of the paintings that we could photograph.

A copy of a section of the cave paintings suspended from the ceiling in the museum

Another copy of some of  the paintings. Even the fake stone wall is an exact copy of the wall of the cave where these paintings were found.

Back to Sarlat after a fun day, reflecting on how lucky we are to live in a time of flush toilets and electricity, and let's not forget - no marauding Norsemen.

We weren't very hungry, but stopped at a bar on the main square for a drink, and then found a crepe place for a crepe or two.

We meandered back to our hotel along the cobbled lanes, through the half-timbered buildings all lit up, feeling like we might want to call home and have the kids sell our houses and belongings. We'll just stay here.