Photo : Getfunky Paris / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Grotte de St Marcel
The Saint-Marcel cave opens in the commune of Bidon, at the entrance of the Ardèche gorges. This network, carved into Cretaceous limestones, has more than 60 kilometres of surveyed galleries, which makes it one of the largest cavities in France. A hunter from Aiguèze went in in 1838 while chasing game, then the speleologist Édouard-Alfred Martel described it in 1894 in his book Les Abîmes.
Excavations carried out in the 1930s and 1940s, then Belgian and French explorations from the 1960s, made the importance of the place known. Several thousand stone tools from the Mousterian period and a painting of a bovid about 20,000 years old, discovered in 1963, were found there. The site has been listed since 1934 and open to the public since 1989. The developed part, of about 600 metres, has 416 steps and shows notably gours, calcite basins filled with water, remnants of an underground river.
