The Lot is a département of limestone plateaux, deep valleys and stone villages, with very well-known sites such as Rocamadour, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and the Padirac chasm. Distances are reasonable, but roads are winding.
This itinerary groups the best-rated sites in the catalogue into three geographically coherent days, so you can enjoy the landscapes between visits.
The map shows the numbered stops in visiting order, with one colour per day. The line follows the roads where available; otherwise it joins the stops as the crow flies. Distances and times are approximate (by car, without traffic).
This day brings together 4 sites close to each other: villages, caves and waterfalls. Allow half an hour to an hour and a half per site, plus travel time.
The town of Carennac has a very picturesque charm with its blond-stone houses, its brown and russet tile roofs adorned with turrets or tall chimneys, its delightful wooden balconies, its fine carved windows and its Renaissance ogives.
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The Padirac chasm is a natural cavity 75 m deep that opens in the surface of the Causse de Gramat in the Lot, beneath which, at 103 m, flows an underground river.
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The Autoire waterfall tumbles from the top of the cliffs of a remarkable rocky cirque with lush vegetation.
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At random in the lanes taken, you discover, dazzled, a fountain surrounded by half-timbered houses; further on, the overhangs of old white dwellings with brown tile roofs; elsewhere, one, two, three manor houses, each prettier than the last, all smart and flanked by turrets…
View full page →This day brings together 3 sites close to each other: villages, castles and caves. Allow half an hour to an hour and a half per site, plus travel time.
Perched above the Lot, Puy-l'Évêque is formed of a maze of lanes and stairs lined with fine golden-stone houses that descend to the slipway where the gabares once moored before leaving for Bordeaux.
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The church of Saint-Sauveur and the crypt of Saint-Amadour are classified as UNESCO World Heritage, as part of the Routes of Saint James of Compostela.
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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.
View full page →This day brings together 5 sites close to each other: caves, natural wonders and villages. Allow half an hour to an hour and a half per site, plus travel time.
Known to prehistoric man, who performed the rites of his religion there, this cave was rediscovered 200 centuries later, in 1922.
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At Cabrerets, in the Lot, the Pescalerie spring is a karst resurgence that feeds a calcifying waterfall at the foot of a cliff in the Célé valley.
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River navigation, sunk by the advent of the railway, had its hours of glory, which then rhymed with gabares, large wooden barges used to carry goods.
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The Phosphatières du Cloup d'Aural, a former nineteenth-century mine where fossils of animals dating from 55 to 18 million years ago were found.
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Perched on a peninsula-shaped rock overlooking the meander of the Lot, the village has over time adorned itself with an exceptional architectural heritage.
View full page →Spring and autumn are the most pleasant: temperatures are mild and the landscapes colourful. In summer, the best-known villages are very busy, and the heat can be strong on the causses. Winter is quiet, but many sites are closed or open only a few days a week.
A car is the simplest way: the sites are spread between the Lot and Dordogne valleys and the causses, with winding roads. You can paddle the Lot by boat or canoe on some stretches. Hilltop villages are often hard to reach by car: park at the entrance.
The village is firmly anchored on its rocky spur in Haut-Quercy. The name Cardaillac rings clear, a little Gascon.
Vast caves with concretions where an electric train and a lift bring you to the starting point, galleries leading to the Lake hall and the Hall of Marvels where "black light" creates fine effects.
This village is largely classified as a historic monument. It stretches along a main street cut by picturesque, very flowery little lanes, carriérous or stairs linking houses.
The flowered lanes of Loubressac converge on a shaded square where the church of the twelfth and sixteenth centuries rises.
Held from the eleventh to the early fifteenth century by the family of that name, then by a collateral branch, Castelnau was the seat of an important Quercy châtellenie that gave bishops of Rodez and Cahors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
5 km from Saint-Céré (Lot).