The Cap Blanc shelter is located on the commut de Marquay to the east of Les Eyzies, it is a site managed by the national monuments discovered in 1909 and listed in the world heritage by UNESCO since 1979.
It is a prehistoric rock shelter from the Magdalenian period: the last phase of the European Upper Paleolithic, between about 17,000 and 12,000 years before the present. The shelter is characterized by its huge bas-relief sculpture of various animals: it is called a bestiary.
There are bison, other animals sometimes difficult to identify (ibex, bears, reindeer ...) and mainly horses: the central horse is 2.20m long. The whole bestiary is 13m long.
The reliefs were executed with a flint peak: the artist has dug the limestone rock with percussion, the figure thus diverted seems to "come out" of the wall.
A human female skeleton was exhumed from the base of the shelter wall. He was lying on his left side in the fetal position with one hand on his face. The body was placed under three slabs of stone: today it has been replaced by a facsimile, the original having been in Chicago's Field Museum since 1926.
A museographic space offers you a panorama of the daily life and artistic creation of prehistoric man.
For conservation reasons, the number of visitors admitted daily is very limited and may be modified each day. Online booking is compulsory on the website: www. sites-les-eyzies.fr with a limit of 30 people per visit to Cap-Blanc
