Roche de Solutré

Solutré-Pouilly

The limestone escarpment of Solutré, formed some 160 million years ago from coral reefs and exposed during the Alpine uplift, is Burgundy's most famous rock — and the setting for one of the finest legends manufactured in French history. Excavations opened in 1866 at the Crot du Charnier, at the foot of the rock, uncovered one of the richest deposits in Europe: a bone layer a metre thick over more than a hectare, the remains of several tens of thousands of horses killed over more than 25,000 years, which gave its name to the Solutrean culture. As early as 1872, one of the excavators, Adrien Arcelin, published a prehistoric novel, Solutré ou les chasseurs de rennes de la France centrale, in which he imagined hunters driving herds of horses off the top of the cliff; the image, relayed by a famous engraving, took hold in textbooks and the popular imagination for a century. Prehistorians nonetheless refuted it without difficulty: the deposit lies too far from the summit, and none of the bones unearthed bears the fractures a fall would cause. The work of Jean Combier restored a more prosaic but no less skilful reality — horses driven along the foot of the cliff into a natural trap, where they were killed, butchered and smoked. The rock took on a second, symbolic life with the ritual climb that President François Mitterrand made there every Whitsun, surrounded by those close to him, turning the summit into a site of political as well as prehistoric memory.

Roche de Solutré : la chasse à l'abîme — Hominides ↗

Getting there : 8 km west of Mâcon via the D54. Two car parks by the departmental Museum of Prehistory, at the foot of the rock. The path to the summit takes about 1h30 round trip, with no technical difficulty but full sun exposure; the site is an environmentally sensitive area, stay on the marked paths. The museum sheds precise light on the Crot du Charnier deposit.

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

Ambient sound