The Sistine Chapel of prehistory
Tucked into the Vézère valley at Montignac, in the Dordogne, Lascaux is probably the best known decorated cave on the planet. Discovered in 1940, it yielded an extraordinary ensemble: nearly 600 painted or engraved animals and hundreds of signs, made around 21,000 years ago by Magdalenian people. It is often called the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory", and with good reason.
A sanctuary, not a home
Nobody ever lived in Lascaux. There is no trace of lasting daily life: it was a place apart, visited to paint and engrave by the light of fat lamps. The artists covered the walls with horses, aurochs, stags and ibex, almost without landscape or vegetation, as if floating in the space of the rock.
A walk through the chambers
The visit begins in the Hall of the Bulls, the most spectacular. Huge black aurochs, one of them over five metres long, stretch across the wall in a striking frieze, with horses and stags. This is also where you find the mysterious "unicorn", a composite animal figure that nobody has managed to identify.
The Axial Gallery continues from the hall as a narrow passage covered in horses, including the famous "Chinese horses", and a cow that seems to tumble head first. Further on, the Nave has a frieze of stags that appear to be swimming and a great black cow. Finally, at the bottom of a shaft that is hard to reach, lies the most enigmatic scene in all of prehistory.
The Shaft scene
In this recess a man with a bird's head falls backwards in front of a wounded bison, its entrails hanging out; a rhinoceros walks away and a bird sits on a stick. It is one of the very rare human figures in Palaeolithic art, and the only true narrative scene at Lascaux. A hunting tale, a myth, a shamanic journey? Since its discovery it has fed every hypothesis without confirming any.
What each area contains
Lascaux has seven decorated sectors along no more than 235 metres of galleries. According to the French Ministry of Culture:
- Hall of the Bulls: 130 figures, the largest bull measuring 5.60 m.
- Axial Gallery: 161 figures over about thirty metres, including the Great Black Bull (3.71 m).
- Nave: 27 horses, 9 ibex, 6 stags, 5 bison and a single aurochs, the Great Black Cow.
- Felines Gallery: more than 80 figures, including six felines, which are rare elsewhere.
- Apse: more than a thousand figures in about 30 m².
- Shaft: eight figures, at the lowest point of the cave.
How the painters worked
The artists had a real palette: yellow and red ochres and manganese oxide for black, applied with a pad, a brush or blown on to give flat tints and gradations. Hematite gave the reds and goethite the yellows, used pure with water as the only binder. More than a hundred lamps have been found, mostly simple hollowed slabs of limestone. Many figures follow the natural relief of the rock, which gives the bodies volume.
What do the images mean?
Nobody knows for certain. Hunting magic, mythology, a seasonal calendar, initiation rites, cosmology: interpretations have followed one another without any winning out. What is sure is that Lascaux shows fully developed symbolic thought, able to organise hundreds of figures according to a logic that still escapes us.
How old is Lascaux?
You will see both 17,000 and 21,000 years, for the same thing. Radiocarbon gives a raw "conventional" age; corrected with a calibration curve, it becomes a calendar age, which is older. The most recent dating, in 2020, places the use of the cave between 21,500 and 21,000 years ago.
Four teenagers, September 1940
On 12 September 1940 four young people, Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agniel and Simon Coencas, stumbled on the entrance. Lascaux at once became a worldwide symbol of prehistory. Ravidat and Marsal guarded the cave through the winter and became its guides in 1948.
Why the original is closed
Opened to the public after the war, Lascaux was hugely popular, with more than a thousand visitors a day. But the carbon dioxide, humidity and heat they produced upset the cave: first a "green sickness" caused by algae, then a "white sickness" of calcite veils. To save the paintings the cave was closed in 1963 and has been under close scientific watch ever since. It is listed as a historic monument and, since 1979, is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Vézère valley prehistoric sites.
Visiting today: Lascaux II or Lascaux IV?
You can no longer enter the original cave, but its replicas are remarkably faithful.
- Lascaux IV (December 2016, the International Centre for Cave Art): the whole cave, Shaft included, followed by interpretation spaces. Allow 2 to 3 hours on site; about 16 °C inside.
- Lascaux II (1983), 200 m from the original: only the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery, on a guided torch-lit tour at 13 °C.
Choose Lascaux IV to see everything, Lascaux II for the intimacy of the original hillside. Combined tickets exist.
Around Lascaux
Ten minutes away at Thonac, the Parc du Thot shows bison, aurochs and Przewalski's horses. Downstream, around Les Eyzies, the Vézère valley has at least 37 decorated caves and shelters, the highest density in western Europe. See our pages on Font-de-Gaume and the Vézère valley weekend, or the guide to painted caves in France.
Practical information was checked in October 2026: please confirm opening times and book on the official website before your visit.