Plan your visit
Grotte Chauvet is one of France’s great natural sites — bring good shoes and a camera. Locate it on the map, book a room nearby in a click, or add it to your travel list to build your itinerary.
About Grotte Chauvet
Sealed and hidden for millennia until its discovery in 1994, the Grotte Chauvet in the Ardèche holds the oldest known cave paintings in the world — an astonishing bestiary of lions, rhinos, mammoths, bears and horses drawn some 36,000 years ago with breathtaking skill. So precious and fragile that the original cave is permanently closed, its wonders are faithfully recreated in the vast replica known as the Grotte Chauvet 2, near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, one of the largest cave facsimiles ever built. Walking through its darkened galleries, visitors come face to face with the earliest masterpieces of humankind. Now inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, Chauvet overturned our understanding of prehistoric art and stands among the most moving cultural sites in all of France.