La Roche-Posay and Angles-sur-l'Anglin: The Skin Spa and the Sorcerers' Rock

Required Activities

• Spend three hours at the Spa Source in La Roche-Posay, with its thermal pool at 32°C, sauna, hammam and outdoor jacuzzi

• In the Centre d'interprétation du Roc-aux-Sorciers, work along the replica of the frieze Suzanne de Saint-Mathurin and Dorothy Garrod uncovered in 1950, and find what makes it unique: not just bison, horses, ibex and big cats, but headless and footless women called Venuses, and human faces, which almost no other Palaeolithic site has

• Climb to the half-ruined fortress on its rock spur above Angles, held by a Protestant garrison from 1567 to 1571 and quarried for its stone after the Revolution, and look down on the mill, the ford and the lower town across the Anglin

• Watch a needlewoman draw and re-knot the threads of a jour d'Angles, the openwork linen the village's workshops have made since the 19th century and sold to Belle Époque society, and see how many stitches go into a hand's breadth of it

• Walk down to the south-facing cliff above the ford and find the two shelters, Taillebourg upstream and Bourdois downstream: people lived here among the carvings, with their fires set at the feet of the women and the ibex, and the art survived 14,000 years only because the overhang collapsed on top of it