Plan your visit
Grotte de Pech Merle 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 de Pech Merle
One of the greatest painted caves in the world still open to the public, the Grotte du Pech Merle at Cabrerets in the Lot preserves prehistoric art of astonishing power some 25,000 years old. Across its natural chambers, Ice Age artists painted a famous frieze of spotted horses, mammoths, bison and aurochs, surrounded by negative hand stencils blown onto the rock — and, extraordinarily, the fossilised footprints of a prehistoric child are preserved in the clay floor. All this hangs within a cave of great natural beauty, rich in concretions and discs. Because it remains open (with visitor numbers carefully limited), Pech Merle offers the rare and moving chance to stand before authentic Palaeolithic masterpieces in their original setting. Awe-inspiring and profoundly humbling, it is a summit of humanity's earliest art.