Another Cave and Beautiful Villages

 

October 22, 2021

Another Cave and Beautiful Villages

 We began today checking out of our hotel in Sarlat, and drove to a cave with prehistoric art in which we are allowed to see the actual cave paintings.  Pech Merle cave is long, deep and wet, and has art which has some unique features.  Photos are not allowed; the next two are from the internet.  There are spotted horses:


And, very interesting, negative paintings of hands.  Our guide said that the proposed mechanism is the placing of the hand on the wall and the spraying of the wall and hand with paint from the mouth.  It is suspected that these are the hands of women, making unsure the gender of the artists:

 


Following our visit to the cave, we drove to another incredibly beautiful mountainside village, St. Cirq Lapopie, where we wandered for a while.  It is incredibly photogenic:




Finally we drove to Rocamadour where we’ll stay two nights.  This is yet another beautiful town on a mountainside, with a church with a story.  St. Amadour is the founder of the shrine to Our Lady of Roamadour, or Notre Dame de Rocamadour.  A body found here in 1162 may be his, and a relic (a humerus bone) is thought to be his.  It is a pilgrimage site, and there are stations of the cross along a route up from the valley to the chapel on the hill.  This is the village as we approach:

 


The path to the chapel has stones placed on the wall—more explanation needed:


The chapel is the end point of the walk:


We checked in to our hotel and had dinner.  Tomorrow Gouffre de Padirac!

Comments

  1. Ralph P. LockeOctober 23, 2021 at 2:36 AM

    Wow, you're seeing such amazing sights! Fascinating, about the stenciled hands--it never occurred to me that the artists may have blown the paint from their mouths. (Of course, it's also very evocative that we nowadays do the same kind of artwork with schoolchildren, though more often by tracing the hand rather than spraying paint around it. How little humans change, in a way!)
    Rocamadour has all kinds of fascinating things, from what I see in Wikipedia. I'd be happy to just sit at that little cafe for a while!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rwa442October 23, 2021 at 6:42 AM

    I wonder what daily life is like for the people living in these villages. What work do they do, how do they shop, cook, eat, Are they connected, do they watch tv, medical care, are they happy, do they prefer being isolated...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Victor PoleshuckOctober 23, 2021 at 8:44 AM

      According to our guide, it's a mixed blessing to have your village listed in the "One Hundred Most Beautiful" and some towns request not to be there. This town gets up to one million visitors a year, and almost everyone here is involved in the tourist business. So despite being geographically out of the way, they are far from isolated. Are they happy? Probably not over the past 18 months. Tourism is just starting to pick up.

      Delete

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