Cro de Grandville Dite Grotte de Rouffignac, Fleurac, Aquitaine, France
It was made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979. It is an impressive cave – vast and slowly descending, and in the ambient light it appears to be the size of a motorway tunnel, smoothly sculpted by water over time. Impressive intermittent panels of black drawings and engravings gradually move from the walls to the ceiling as the cave ceiling lowers, whilst on the floor there are tessellating hollows of cave bear pits once used for hibernation, until the end of the cave is finally reached, where a dizzying display of drawings including woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, horses, bison and ibex adorns the ceiling; a prehistoric Sistine Chapel. Like Michelangelo, these would have been drawn by the Palaeolithic artists lying down.
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