SAINT-CIRQ LAPOPIE - Chemin de Halage de BOUZIÈS - Grotte du PECH MERLE

SAINT-CIRQ LAPOPIE is a commune in the Lot department in south-western France. It is a member of the Les Plus Beaux Villages de France ("The most beautiful villages of France") association .

Its position, originally selected for defense, perched on a steep cliff 100 m above the river has helped make the town one of the most popular tourist destinations in the department, and the entire town is almost a museum.

After it was "discovered" by the Post-Impressionist Henri Martin, it became popular with other artists and the home of the writer André Breton.

PECH MERLE is a cave which opens onto a hillside at Cabrerets in the Lot département of the Occitania region in France, about 35 minutes by road east of Cahors. It is one of the few prehistoric cave painting sites in France that remain open to the general public.

Extending for over a kilometre and a half from the entrance are caverns, the walls of which are painted with dramatic murals dating from the Gravettian culture (some 25,000 years BC).

Some of the paintings and engravings, however, may date from the later Magdalenian era (16,000 years BC).

This area once had a great river flowing through it, cutting underground channels which were later used by humans for shelter and eventually for mural painting.

The cave art located in the deeper areas of the cave was discovered in 1922 by Andre David and Henri Dutetre, two teen-aged boys who had been exploring the cave for two years.

Like other children of the area, these two had been encouraged and assisted in their exploration by Father Amedee Lemozi, the curate of Cabrerets, an amateur archaeologist who had discovered other cave paintings in the region.

The walls of seven of the chambers at Pech Merle have fresh, lifelike images of woolly mammoth, spotted horses,] single colour horses, bovids, reindeer, handprints, and some humans.

Footprints of children, preserved in what was once clay, have been found more than half a mile underground.