Grotte des Combarelles

Les Eyzies

A narrow corridor runs more than two hundred metres into the hillside, at the edge of the Beune valley. Émile Rivière had excavated the porch from 1891 to 1894 without seeing the walls. On 8 September 1901, Denis Peyrony, Louis Capitan and the abbé Breuil recognised the engravings. Two days later Breuil wrote that it was ‘an enormous firecracker in the prehistoric world’. Four days after that, Peyrony found the paintings of Font-de-Gaume, two kilometres away. The two caves finally convinced the scholars who had doubted Altamira. Breuil first counted 291 engravings; today more than 600 are recorded: horses, bison, reindeer, mammoths and some fifty schematic human figures. Bones dated by radiocarbon under the porch gave 13,680 and 11,380 years BP, in the Magdalenian. The cave is one of the fifteen sites of the Vézère valley inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1979.

Musée national de Préhistoire — Grotte des Combarelles ↗

Getting there: Route de Sarlat (D47), 2 km from the town of Les Eyzies; guided tour of about one hour, in small groups, online booking compulsory through the national monuments ticket office; closed on Saturdays, 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Coordinates of the ticket office from OpenStreetMap.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound