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Niaux Cave, Midi Pyrenees
Niaux Cave Painting
The area is one of the cradles of the humanity and Niaux's cave invites you in a moving journey into the past to find the life, the tracks and the paintings of our ancestors of 13000 years ago. Niaux is one of the rare decorated caves still opened to the public.
La Grotte de Niaux is an exceptional example of a painted prehistoric cave in that the main gallery (the salon noir) is a long but interesting walk from the cave's mouth. After a dim walk in the silent, womb-like stillness, you'll break into a large naturally domed space to marvel at the paintings above. There are extraordinary representations of horses and bison here.
To researchers, the exceptional size of the Niaux gallery indicates that many people could be assembled in this one sacred space. The animals are painted in black, all of the same kind of paint--no doubt created within a relatively brief span of time (somewhere between 12,000 and 9,000 BC). And there is evidence that scaffolding was used to the get paintings high up on the dome.