Lascaux: The Cave You Can’t Visit, and the Four Boys Who Found It

In the second week of September 1940, three months after France fell to Germany, a teenager named Marcel Ravidat went poking around a hole on the wooded hill above Montignac, a small town on the Vézère river in the Dordogne. It was an old foxes’ den, and local legend said a secret passage ran from somewhere on that hill to the nearby manor of Lascaux. Ravidat was not after art. Like generations of boys before him, he was after the treasure in the tunnel.

What he and three friends found when they went back on September 12 is now counted among the greatest works of art ever made: hundreds of painted animals, horses, bulls, stags and bison, many of them larger than life, on the walls and ceilings of a cave that no one had entered for something like 20,000 years.

Almost nobody alive has seen those paintings with their own eyes. The original Lascaux cave was open to the public for less than fifteen years. It was closed in April 1963, and it has stayed closed ever since, through two microbial crises and the building of four separate replicas. It may be the most famous place in the world that you are not allowed to visit.

Four boys and a lamp

According to the French Ministry of Culture’s account, Ravidat found the hole and came back four days later with three other boys: Jacques Marsal, from the village, Georges Agniel, who was on holiday in the area, and Simon Coencas, whose family had fled from Montreuil, near Paris, into the unoccupied zone that June. A dog named Robot features in many tellings of the story. Ravidat himself added details over the years, and some of the more colorful versions have drifted a long way from the original.

The boys enlarged the opening and Ravidat lowered himself into a small vertical shaft. He landed on a cone of loose scree and slid all the way to the bottom. The others followed. By the light of a hastily made lamp they walked along a gallery about thirty meters long, and saw the first paintings above their heads. The next day, with a rope, Ravidat was the first to climb down an eight-meter-deep pit at the back of the cave, now called the Shaft. At its foot he found the strangest image in Lascaux.

The boys told their teacher, Léon Laval, a keen amateur archaeologist, who went down himself on September 18. On September 21 the most famous prehistorian in France, the priest Henri Breuil, came to see the cave. Breuil, who had taken refuge in the region after the German invasion, arrived with Jean Bouyssonie, Dr. Cheynier and Denis Peyrony, the curator of the prehistory museum at Les Eyzies, just down the valley. They were convinced at once that the paintings were authentic and very old.

The war shaped what happened next. Ravidat and Marsal camped by the entrance through the winter of 1940 to 1941 to guard it. Coencas was Jewish. When a German decree of September 27, 1940 required Jews to register, his family went back to Paris. In 1942 they were arrested and held at the Drancy internment camp, and the Red Cross got Simon and his sister out because they were young. The rest of the family was deported and murdered. He did not return to Lascaux until 1986.

What is on the walls

Lascaux is not a large cave. Its accessible passages run for a little over 200 meters, divided by archaeologists into sections with names like the Hall of the Bulls, the Axial Gallery, the Passageway, the Nave, the Apse, the Chamber of Felines and the Shaft. Into that space the painters packed some 600 animals and many hundreds of engraved figures. André Glory, who spent a decade from 1952 recording the engravings, counted 286 figures in the Passageway, 87 in the Chamber of Felines and about 600 in the Apse alone.

Horses are by far the most common animal. Stags, aurochs, ibex and bison follow, with rarer appearances by a bear, felines and a rhinoceros. In the Hall of the Bulls, the first chamber the boys entered, huge black aurochs bulls stride across the white calcite ceiling among red horses and deer. One of them is 5.2 meters long, the largest animal yet found in cave art. Next to them is an odd creature with two straight lines jutting from its head that early visitors nicknamed "the unicorn."

Aurochs were wild cattle, bigger than any modern breed, and they survived in Europe for many thousands of years after Lascaux was painted, until the last aurochs died in a Polish royal forest in the 17th century. At Lascaux they are shown as the painters saw them, with their great curving horns.

There are almost no people. In the Shaft, the scene Ravidat found at the bottom of the rope is the only clear human figure in the cave: a stick-like man with what looks like a bird’s head, apparently falling backward in front of a wounded bison whose entrails hang out. Beside him is a bird on a pole. No one knows what it means, and theories about it fill shelves.

The palette was limited. The Ministry of Culture’s studies of the pigments found reds from hematite, yellows from goethite and blacks from manganese oxide, which is common in the region. The painters worked high on the walls, in places that needed scaffolding, and they worked by firelight. More than a hundred lamps have been found at Lascaux, most of them limestone slabs with a shallow hollow to hold burning animal fat. The finest, a polished lamp of red sandstone with a carved handle, turned up at the foot of the Shaft scene in Glory’s excavations of 1961 and 1962.

How old is it?

Lascaux was an early test case for radiocarbon dating. In 1951 charcoal from the Shaft was analyzed in Chicago at the laboratory of Willard Libby, who had invented the method. Since then, the estimates have moved around with better methods and better samples. New dates on reindeer antler from the early excavations, obtained in 1998 and 2002, pointed to roughly 23,000 to 22,000 years ago in calendar years. A more recent research program, reviewed by the Ministry of Culture, places the main occupation around 21,000 years ago, at the transition between the Badegoulian and the Magdalenian cultures of the late Ice Age.

Precise figures vary between studies, and older books often give 17,000 years. The honest answer is that the paintings are roughly 20,000 years old, give or take a few thousand, and that people were painting in the cave long before anything like a city, a written word or a farm existed anywhere on Earth.

Opened to the world

After the war, work began to make the cave fit for visitors. It was finished in 1948, and Lascaux opened to the public on July 14 that year. Ravidat and Marsal became its guides. Excavations led by Breuil and Séverin Blanc began the following year, starting in the Shaft, perhaps in the hope of finding a burial at the foot of the strange scene.

The crowds came quickly. By 1955, according to most accounts, around 1,200 people a day were filing through a cave whose air had been sealed for millennia. Every one of them breathed out carbon dioxide and water vapor, gave off body heat, and carried in spores and dust on their clothes and shoes. The authorities installed an air regeneration system. To house the machinery, the entryway was dug out to a depth of five meters, and the floors were dug up from one end of the cave to the other to bury its ducts.

None of it stopped the damage. By the late 1950s Ravidat and Marsal, who saw the walls every day, were pointing out patches of green growing on the rock. It was an alga, later identified as Bracteacoccus minor, and it became known as la maladie verte, "the green disease." Researchers have since pointed out that it was fed by the organic matter, warmth and moisture that the visitors themselves brought in. A second problem, la maladie blanche, was a white film of calcite forming over some of the paintings.

The day the door closed

The man who saw where this was going was Max Sarradet, the cave’s curator from 1955. From 1960 he warned André Malraux, the writer then serving as France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs, that the tourists were a threat to the survival of the paintings. In March 1963 a scientific committee was set up to study the cave. As soon as Sarradet had its first report, he persuaded Malraux to close Lascaux to the public. The door shut in April 1963.

It is hard to overstate how unusual that decision was. Lascaux was a national treasure and a profitable tourist attraction, and the state chose to stop people seeing it at all. In 1972 the cave passed from private hands to the French state.

Jacques Marsal, one of the four boys, stayed on as a guardian of the closed cave. From then on, the only people allowed inside were the small number of scientists and conservators charged with looking after it.

It may be the most famous place in the world that you are not allowed to visit.

Fungus, lime and black stains

Closing the cave did not make it safe. In 2001, after a new air-handling system had been installed, the fungus Fusarium solani spread across the ceiling, walls and floor. Conservators fought it with quicklime spread on the floors and with biocides. Then black stains, probably fungal, began to appear on the walls. Biocides were brought back in January 2008, and that year the cave was closed for three months even to scientists.

Microbiologists have since argued that the treatments themselves shaped the problem. A 2010 review in the journal Microbiology found that the biocides had selected for hardier bacteria, and that tiny cave arthropods were carrying fungal spores from place to place. In 2018 researchers formally described a new fungus, named Scolecobasidium lascauxense after the cave where it was first found.

Today the Ministry of Culture treats Lascaux as a patient under permanent observation. Two research programs on the cave’s microbial ecology, from 2009 to 2011 and from 2014 to 2017, tried to understand the whole underground ecosystem instead of killing one organism at a time. The state spends about €600,000 a year on the cave’s conservation, and the official position is that keeping the public out remains necessary.

Lascaux II, III and IV

Since people could no longer see the real cave, France decided to build copies. A first reconstruction of the Hall of the Bulls was shown at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1980. Lascaux II, a copy of the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery set into the same hill, opened in 1983. Its walls are shells of reinforced concrete, sculpted and painted with natural pigments using the original artists’ techniques. According to the ministry, some 10 million people have visited it.

Lascaux III, launched in 2012, is a touring exhibition built around five full-size replicas of panels from the Nave and the Shaft, which has traveled to cities around the world.

Then came Lascaux IV. Concerns that crowds on top of the hill might still affect the original cave led to a new International Centre for Cave Art at the foot of the hill, designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta. President François Hollande inaugurated it on December 10, 2016, and it opened to the public five days later. The Guardian put the cost at €57 million. Inside is a near-complete copy of the cave, built from laser scans accurate to about a millimeter. Snøhetta says 25 artists spent two years painting the resin walls, using the same kinds of pigments as the originals.

The copy is kept cool and damp, at about 16°C, and the lights flicker like fat lamps. Simon Coencas, by then the last of the four boys alive, came back for the opening.

Why the cave stays shut

Lascaux is not alone. In 1979 UNESCO listed it as part of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley, a stretch of river that holds 147 prehistoric sites and 25 decorated caves. And when Lascaux IV opened, the Guardian noted that the other two most celebrated painted caves, Altamira in Spain and Chauvet in France, could also be visited only through their replicas.

There is a family resemblance between Lascaux and the places in our Forbidden Pacific story: somewhere so fragile, so dangerous or so valuable that the only responsible thing to do is keep people out. Lascaux is the rare case where the threat was not war or bombs or disease but simply admirers, one breath at a time.

It is also a reminder of how lucky archaeology can be. Like Ötzi, the Iceman found by two hikers in the Alps, Lascaux was stumbled upon by people who were not looking for it, and its survival depended on what was done in the first few years after its discovery. Here the early mistakes, the enlarged entrance, the lights and the crowds, came close to destroying what 20,000 years in the dark had preserved.

The four boys grew old with the cave. They met there again in 1986, and Simon Coencas came back for the 50th and 70th anniversaries of the discovery too. Coencas, the boy who was 13 when he slid down the scree, died in Paris on February 2, 2020, at 93. He liked to say that he still had the shape of the cave in his head, and could almost draw it. Very few people can say that, and that is, by design, how it will stay.

Further reading