The Vézère Valley: Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac

Required Activities

• Walk the full-size copy of Lascaux at Montignac and stand in the reproduced Salle des Taureaux, 17 m long and 7 m high — then work out why you are not in the real one: a million people went through the cave between 1948 and 1963, algae and a calcite veil took hold, Malraux shut it in April 1963, and human presence in the original is now capped at 200 hours a year

• Visit Font-de-Gaume at Les Eyzies, one of the last major painted caves in France with original polychrome work still open to the public, and find the two facing reindeer on the left-hand wall — one standing with brown antlers appearing to lick the forehead of the other, kneeling with small red ones

• Visit the Musée national de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies, the museum set into the cliff

• Ride the little electric train four kilometres in and out of Rouffignac, one of the largest painted caves in Europe at over eight kilometres of gallery, and count mammoths — there are 158 of them, with woolly rhinoceros, bison, horses and ibex among them; on the way, look at the floor and walls for the hollows and claw marks left by cave bears long before anyone drew anything here

• Before you leave the valley, work out how many of the fifteen prehistoric sites and painted caves that UNESCO listed together in 1979 you have actually been inside today — and how many of the fifteen are within an hour's drive of where you are standing