The story of this place
On 12 September 1940, four teenage boys and their dog stumbled on a hidden cave near Montignac in the Dordogne, revealing walls covered with breathtaking Paleolithic paintings roughly 17,000 years old. Lascaux's galleries teem with some 600 painted and 1,500 engraved figures—galloping horses, great aurochs bulls up to 5 metres long, deer and a famous scene of a wounded bison and a falling man—rendered in ochre, charcoal and manganese by Ice Age artists. Opened to tourists in 1948, the cave was overwhelmed: visitors' breath fostered algae and fungi that attacked the art, and it was closed in 1963. Visitors now tour precise replicas, most recently Lascaux IV, opened in 2016.