Mas-d'Azil Cave
A cathedral-scale tunnel carved by the River Arize — cars drive straight through it — where Magdalenian bison share the dark with the painted pebbles that named the Azilian culture.
The Arize river bored a 420-metre tunnel through a Pyrenean ridge in Ariège, so vast that a road has run through the cave since the 1850s. In its side galleries, Magdalenian artists engraved and painted bison, horses, fish and an ibex some 15,000 years ago, while riverbank deposits yielded the painted pebbles that led Édouard Piette, digging here from 1887, to define the Azilian culture. The decorated galleries are closed for conservation, but guided tours, a facsimile gallery and a village museum — home of the famous "fawn with birds" spear-thrower — carry the story.
Gallery
Notable Features
- ◦ A road and the Arize river run right through the cave
- ◦ Type-site of the Azilian culture and its painted pebbles
- ◦ Magdalenian engravings of bison, horses, fish and ibex