Lascaux vs Lascaux II

What did I expect? I knew that the original Lascaux caves had been shut some years ago as the heat and carbon dioxide from all the clamouring tourists had been damaging the paintings. I felt really sad about that, and didn’t know until just recently that they had been meticulously recreating the interior and the paintings in an underground space on practically the same site. Great!

Staying in the Dordogne, and being 20 minutes’ drive from Lascaux, caused great excitement in our house. We have a children’s book that covers all of the regions in France and the highlights of each spot. Our eight year old son has practically memorised the book, which has in it an image of the fallen tree covering the entrance to the cave at the time of its discovery. The paintings are thought to be around 17,300 years old and are mostly images of large animals, which are known from fossil evidence to have lived in the area at the time. In 1979, Lascaux was added as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so it’s pretty important.

Here’s an excerpt from a website worth reading more of www.savelascauxl.org, about the discovery of the cave:

In September 1940, four boys and a dog (called Robot) set out on an adventure in Dordogne. The boys - Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas – where intrigued by an old legend about a tunnel running under the Vézère River linking the old Castel of Montignac to the Manor of Lascaux. According to the legend, this tunnel would lead to a second tunnel and a treasure hidden deep in the woods of Montignac.

As they walked through the woods the little dog, Robot, ran ahead toward a deep depression in the ground covered with overgrowth and began sniffing the sunken hole. The depression had originally been created by an uprooted tree. The boys hurried to catch up with Robot. When they saw the deep hole, they immediately thought it might lead them to the legendary tunnel and the hidden treasure.

After trying to determine the depth of the hole by tossing rocks in the opening and listening for contact with the bottom, they decided to explore it. They enlarged the opening by removing a few stones around the edges with their penknives. Then, each one of the four boys slid through the hole in turn, along a semi-vertical shaft embedded with stalagmites down fifteen meters to a dark underground chamber. “The descent was terrifying,” recalled Jacques Marsal who was just fourteen years old at the time, the youngest of the four boys. Inside the chamber they used their oil lantern to look around shining it on the walls and ceiling.

Marsal remembers this first encounter describing what they saw as a “cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave; each animal seemed to be moving.” The ceiling was pure white, covered with calcite. And the paintings were brilliantly multicolored in reds, blacks, browns and ochres. The boys were standing in The Hall of the Bulls. Mesmerized by their findings, the boys ventured to the end of the cave. By then, the light from the oil lantern was fading and they realized they needed to return to the surface….

What a wonderful story!

In a slightly different version on Wikipedia, it says that the entrance to the Lascaux Cave was discovered by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat, who returned to the scene with his three friends to investigate the cave further.
Lascaux II, is a replica of two of the cave halls (the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery) was opened in 1983, 200 metres from the original. Yesterday in the underground cavern entrance, our most handsome French guide with a dreamy documentary voice-over voice, took us on the Lascaux II adventure. Having already visited the wonders of Pech Merle in the Lot in the real, original breath-taking setting (http://www.pechmerle.com/english/introduction.html), we all found the Lascaux II experience to be (and I’m really sorry to say this…) a little underwhelming. The children all said afterwards that they preferred the paintings in the original caves because it felt like you were really ‘there’, seeing what the original artists saw. But for anyone who hasn’t seen original pre-historic paintings in original pre-historic caves, this is an exceptional experience.

The colours, the forms, the use of the natural dents and chips of the cave walls to create the shapes of the animals, the animals themselves, well, it’s all incredible. The paintings were recreated over several years to depict the original paintings. Apparently Pablo Picasso said (in awed humility) after visiting the original Lascaux:

“We [contemporary artists] have learned nothing."

So, onward and upward, we bought our fridge magnet, and wended our way through the Valley of Vézère passing a number of other UNESCO World Heritage prehistoric sites along the way. So much to see in the Dordogne. It’s really beautiful here and it’s no surprise that floods of Englishmen and women have made this part of France their home.