Villars, Puyguilhem and Saint-Jean-de-Côle: The Little Blue Horse and a Renaissance Hunting Lodge

Required Activities

• Tour the Grotte de Villars, 13 km of galleries found in 1953, and get the guide to put the lamp on two things: the little blue horse, drawn in manganese oxide, and the panel where a man and a bison run together — the same subject as the Shaft at Lascaux, and the reason this cave is dated to the early Magdalenian

• Visit the Château de Puyguilhem and find 1524 carved into the frieze of the stair turret — the end of the first building campaign, begun in 1513 for Mondot de La Marthonie, first president of the Paris parlement, who died at Blois in 1517 before he could live in it — then walk the park to the dovecote

• Walk through Saint-Jean-de-Côle over the bridge on the Côle and round the square between the two buildings the village grew from: the 11th-century priory church that started with sixteen Augustinian canons, and the château de la Marthonie built beside it in 1083 to guard the crossroads to Thiviers and Brantôme