Grotte des Merveilles

Discovered on 16 October 1920 and listed as a Historic Monument on 16 May 1925, the Grotte des Merveilles opens on the Causse de Rocamadour, a vast limestone plateau eaten away by the flow of underground water. It is the continual action of this water over several thousand years that carpeted the cave with pretty concretions and gours in which countless stalactites are mirrored, which, depending on the lighting, become statues, mountains or peninsulas. But the highlight of your visit will be your encounter with Upper Palaeolithic art. More than 20,000 years ago, by the light of stone lamps in which animal fat burned, men made this cavern a remarkably decorated sanctuary: negative hands, horses, deer are so many moving testimonies of a spiritual life where the limits of art, magic and religion are hard to discern.

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