Le Grotte de Mas d'Azil

Today we decided to do some more spelunking type of activity and headed for the grotte de Mas D’Azil. The town of Mas d’Azil is not far from where we are staying, and there you will find the grotte, which is partly exposed to the public as the road passes through the tremendous cavern.


Their official website as below has more details:

www.sesta.fr/?site=GrotteDuMasDAzil

The main cavern is we estimated 150 meters across from where the road is through to the other side. It was carved out centuries ago because an inland sea found its way through a crack in the wall and gushed and dissolved the limestone leaving the tremendous cavern.


The tour takes place behind all this so you can’t see the displays until you have paid.

This is a reconstruction of early cave dwellers performing various tasks:

They are still discovering treasures in the caverns, but they found one human skull of a young girl with deer horn in her eye sockets, and a bear skull, as well as lots of human tools of stone, deer bone, and other animal bones and teeth, and wood.


Your ticket also covers entry to the museum which is a few minutes away, where they have the original skull on display as well as other items found in the cavern and caves. Some of them are so finely decorated (but I guess they had no TV and plenty of time once they’d fought off the bears!) Apparently the bears are special cave bears which were missing their pre-molars and were mainly vegetarian and weighed about 500-600kg. They are now extinct.



There was also some crude jewellery, which is actually quite attractive due to its simplicity and lack of over embellishment. Needles made from bone and with an eye for threading – guess they used sinews for cotton. And of course some replica drawings of wall paintings found in the caves. All very interesting and a must if you are interested in geology, prehistoric or early man, caves, fossils, etc.

By the way, the town of Mas d’Azil has some very interesting buildings – many colombage houses in reasonable condition but still looking quite original. The museum has a magnificent stairway (I jokingly asked Wouter if we would have one like this at our place....), the ceiling on the ground floor is decorated with old hessian between the beams and the walls are now filled with brick between the wooden posts instead of peat and straw, but you can still feel the original character of the place.