Childcraft Bucket List: Lascaux Caves

As a child, there was nothing I loved more than sprawling on the living room floor with a volume of the World Book Childcraft Children's Encyclopedia. There were books on every topic that could possibly capture a child's imagination: world and space, fairy tales from all over the world, the human body and how things work. But my favorite volume of them all was "Mysteries and Fantasies".

That book was my first introduction to such places as Stonehenge, Easter Island and the Nazca Lines. The fact that we still didn't know why or how our ancestors built many of these structures was absolutely fascinating to me. I have an entire bucket list devoted to all the places I had read about in Childcraft and hope to visit one day. This June, I was super excited to be able to visit one of them: The Lascaux Caves.

I knew going in, that the original caves had been closed to visitors years ago, and that we would be looking at replicas. So my expectations were suitably lowered. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and beauty of the replicas. A lot of effort had been taken to match the originals. They even used the same materials and techniques that we believe our ancestors used!

So I was somewhat surprised to find myself walking out of the caves still feeling disappointed and very dissatisfied with my experience. If this was the only cave we had visited in the region, I would have been quite disillusioned. Fortunately, earlier in the day, we visited another prehistoric cave that was everything that I had hoped our Lascaux experience would be, but wasn't: Font de Gaume

Along the trail to the entrance of Font de Gaume

Here's what we didn't like about Lascaux, and what made us enjoy Font de Gaume so much

	Pros	Cons
Lascaux	Excellent, high-quality reproductions Informative tours	Too many people on each tour (~40 people) Not enough time to just look at the paintings. I felt rushed. Limited number of English tours Limited parking at both the caves and in town where you buy the tickets
Font de Gaume	Original cave paintings Small group sizes, so everyone had a good view of the paintings Lots of time. Guides gave us a few minutes after their explanations to soak it all in	Limited number of visitors per day Limited number of English tours

Acquiring Tickets

Neither cave made it particularly easy to get tickets, but each made it challenging in different ways.

With Font de Gaume, there are very strict limits on the number of visitors per day (I believe it was 100 when we were there) and you cannot reserve tickets ahead of time. As this is the only cave in the area where original, 17 thousand year old paintings are still open to the public, I totally get that preservation is paramount. Fair enough. So visitors who want to see these paintings either need to get lucky (as we did), or get there very, very early. I didn't even know about Font de Gaume until the day before our visit, so it was dumb luck that we had such a smooth visit. We arrived around 11am and got onto a tour that was starting about an hour later. Our saving grace was the fact that it was early June, before summer holidays had begun for most students, and we went on a weekday. I've heard that in the height of summer, people have lined up at 6am, multiple days in a row, and still didn't get in. If you're planning a visit, it might be wise to stay somewhere closer to the caves and plan to visit on a weekday if you can.

Lascaux's ticket woes were not availability related, they were more logistical. In the summer, tickets must be purchased in town, then you drive about 2kms to the entrance to the caves. There are big signs telling you to buy your ticket before you go to the entrance, but they don't have giant signs saying "Tickets Here". We drove past the ticket purchase area and found that we reached the edge of town almost immediately. We wasted time trying to double back in the heavy traffic and chaos of the construction that was going on at the time. Then, when we got to the parking lot, we discovered it was very small and very full! We were there late in the day, around 4pm, so we managed to snag a spot from someone who was leaving. But the size of the parking area is completely inadequate for the number of visitors Lascaux receives. When you do finally get your tickets and get to the caves, you find that the parking there too is inadequate. Grrr!

Group Size and Tour Length

At Font de Gaume, in addition to limiting the number of visitors per day, they also limit the number of people per group (to 8, I think). This means that everyone has a pretty good view of the paintings and everyone can hear the guide clearly. The tours were also almost a full hour in length, so there was plenty of time to ask questions and see your fill.

At Lascaux, the tour was 40 minutes tops, and there were 40 people in the group. So not only is there a lot of information that needs to be conveyed in a short time, but we lost a lot of time just herding 40 people from one cave to another! And when you get into the small caves, you can really only see the paintings that are right where you are standing. If someone really tall happens to stand in front of you...well...unlucky you! Being packed in like cattle just made me feel like I was in Disneyland instead of an anthropological treasure trove.

I think Lascaux would really benefit from halving their group sizes.

English Tours

For both caves, there were only a limited number of English tours. In fact, Font de Gaume only had English tours one day a week when we were there! So we took the French tours in both places and tried to piece together as much as we could. Nick, having lived in France for a year, definitely got more out of it than I did!

However, when our guide at Font de Gaume realized that half of us were English speaking, she made an effort to translate to English after her French explanation as time permitted. She didn't have to do that, but we really appreciated it! It was clear that she wanted us to appreciate and understand what we were seeing. The smaller group-size and unhurried pace of the tour made this possible. Although there were a significant number of English-speaking people in our Lascaux group as well, something like that would not be possible, as the tour groups are just too large, and the schedules too tight to accomodate it.

Tour Content

Baby it's cold inside...

I found the tour at Lascaux more scientific and informative than Font de Gaume; even when I only understood about 10% of what was said. Nick's superior translation skills really came through for us on this one. For example, I had no idea that the different colours of paint were not the result of different materials. But rather, they are what you get when you heat manganese to different temperatures! How amazing is that! Early man was far more resourceful than I ever gave him (or her!) credit for!

But what Font de Gaume didn't provide in book knowledge, it totally made up for in authenticity. I know it shouldn't make a difference. If you asked me to pick the real painting out of a lineup of replicas, I couldn't do it. But no matter how hard you try, knowing that you are looking at the real deal definitely enhances your experience. There is something truly awe-inspiring about looking at an image that was created by a hand 17, 000 years ago. And something even more special about seeing one of those hands in the form of a negative space hand-print on the wall! It'll give you shivers (as will the cave temperatures, by the way, so bring a fleece!).

Final Verdict

If Lascaux wasn't so famous, I don't think we would have made the effort to go there at all. The experience that captured the sense of awe that I felt as a child reading about prehistoric paintings was the tour at Font de Gaume, and I cannot recommend it highly enough!