Saying something is “better than nothing” or “the next best thing” can sometimes seem like praising with faint damnation.
Both expressions sprang to mind recently in the cool, humid, semi-dark of the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, Ardèche, as I wended my way on the concrete footpath that traverses the 3,000-square-metre site, past drawings and paintings, engravings and stencils whose origins stretch back tens of centuries to when Homo sapien was in the ascendant over Homo neanderthalensis.
I wasn’t alone: bunched beside me among the stalactites and stalagmites were another 12 or 13 journalists, all of us being shepherded by an earnest guide in an orange polo shirt, LED pinpoint flashlight in hand. A few metres ahead another escorted group loomed, numbering around 25. Another group, again of about 25, was just behind us, with more on the way.
It was the official public opening of the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, one of France’s most-hyped tourist attractions, a $75-million “mini-me” replica of a real cavern whose contents upon their discovery two decades ago were hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the prehistoric world.” The replication project spanned almost eight years from conception to completion. And this day, groups would be entering its gloom with guides every four to six minutes, the intention being to pump 4,000 visitors through its twisty topography by closing time that evening.
Forty-nine minutes after entering, my coterie was back outside under the grey, overcast skies of south-central France, staring at the charming valley town of Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in the west, the twin stacks of the Pierrelatte nuclear power plant to the east. For the French government and Kléber Rossillon, the Paris-based private operator of the cavern, we were just the vanguard of the more than 350,000 people who will visit this rather remote corner of France 200 kilometres southwest of Lyon in the next 12 months. Or at least that is the hope.
We had, we all agreed, seen … something. But what that something was was not exactly clear. And had it been “better than nothing”? Or the “next best thing”?
The Caverne du Pont d’Arc, you see, isn’t even a cave – if by this one means a naturally occurring space or passage accessed by a cut or hole in the ground or on the side of a hill, plateau or mountain. The Caverne is, in fact, entirely man-made, housed not in the ground but in a climate-controlled, circular building, clad in thrusting, angular mortar forms and plunked atop a pine-forested hill like a faux paleolithic Parthenon.
Yet the Caverne and its contents are no glib Yesterland, some Disney-esque flight of concrete fancy. They’re a heartfelt, assiduously researched, environmentally astute attempt to capture the awe and majesty of the real thing, commonly known as the Grotte Chauvet. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in June, 2014, the Grotte is located less than five kilometres from its replica – very near, in other words, but in terms of public accessibility, as distant as Uranus.
The Caverne du Pont d’Arc is a sort of frozen-in-aspic tribute to a day and an event – the afternoon of Dec. 18, 1994, when three speleologists out exploring the high, pitted limestone cliffs near the Pont d’Arc, a spectacular natural bridge in the jaw-dropping Ardèche River Gorge, came upon an undiscovered cave. Inside its many chambers, the trio, led by Jean-Marie Chauvet, a then-park ranger with the French Ministry of Culture, discovered what eventually was determined to be the oldest known cache of figurative paintings, drawings and engravings in the world: a bestiary, rendered in charcoal, red ochre and scrapings, of hundreds of wooly rhinoceroses, lions, mammoths, horses, bison, reindeer, aurochs, bears – 15 different species in total. And one owl.
If you go
The Caverne du Pont d’Arc-Ardèche is open every day of the year. Admission is €13 ($17.60) for adults; €6.50 for children aged 10 to 17. (Younger children are admitted free.)
The cave is a 2.5-hour drive from Lyon, Marseilles and Montpellier, and a 1.5-hour drive from Avignon, Nîmes and Valence. A free shuttle is available from Vallon Pont d’Arc. For more transportation information and to purchase tickets visit en.cavernedupontdarc.fr.
There’s no denying the care, prowess and ambition of the replication project. More than 500 persons – engineers, artists, scientists, architects, designers – have been involved. Aided by 3-D computer mapping of the complete original cave and 10,000 high-resolution photographs, they’ve done what appears to be a highly credible recreation of the Chauvet cavern, fashioning stalactites, stalagmites and crystal formations from plastic, bulbous walls from metal skeletons overlaid with mortar, the famous illustrations painted and drawn in charcoal and ochre on resin sheets to the same size of the originals. Scattered on the floors throughout are hundreds of bear skulls, teeth and other animal parts, all made from plastic.
Cave drawings are, of course, hardly unknown to Europe. Those of France’s famous Lascaux cavern were discovered in 1940, the ones in Spain’s equally famous Altamira in 1879. But what distinguished those in the Grotte Chauvet, or the Chauvet Cave, was their sheer variety, their freshness (a rock fall 25,000 years ago sealed the cave’s entrance and hermetically preserved its contents), their sophistication and their age – 36,000 years old, compared with the 17,000 years attributed to those at Lascaux, or the 20,000 some have estimated for Altamira.
Visiting the Lascaux drawings after the Second World War, a stunned Pablo Picasso exclaimed of their creators: “They invented everything” – meaning such staples of the Western art tradition as perspective, animation, modulation of form, ground preparation, stumping, stencilling, even, to some eyes, “the very concept of an image.” The Chauvet drawings upended the notion that the more ancient the art, the more primitive its appearance. Done when no more than 50,000 hunter-gatherers roamed continental Europe, its works look as good as, and in some instances better than, the Ice Age art completed 10 centuries later. Unsurprisingly, news of its discovery, announced in 1995, made headlines around the world (“Le premier grand chef-d’œuvre de l’ humanité!” “Humanity’s First Masterpiece!”) and instant icons of the so-called Panel of the Horses and the Lion Panel images.
It also raised the question: “What is to be done?” Clearly they had to be protected, preserved and studied. Clearly, too, there could be no repeat of what happened at Lascaux where the breath, heat, sweat, tread and touch of wave upon wave of visitors so deteriorated the drawings and their milieu that the site had to be shuttered in 1963 to non-scientists. A similar scenario unfolded at Altamira, with the caves being closed to the public in 2002. At Chauvet, France quickly placed strict limits on access, eventually installing two reinforced steel doors at the cave entrance (only three persons at any one time reportedly know the entry code) and surveillance cameras. Today, just 200 researchers and conservators plus the occasional journalist or three are allowed into its bowels each year, with each carefully staggered individual visit lasting no longer than two hours.
In another time, this might have been the end, more or less, of the Grotte Chauvet saga: the Sistine Chapel of the prehistoric world protected from the destructive intrusions of the public, with archeologists, paleontologists and radio-carbon-dating specialists quietly beavering away. The public, comforted to know a delicate World Heritage Site was being conserved forever, was content to access its irreplaceable treasures via articles in magazines and scientific journals, online reports, lavishly illustrated books and films such as Werner Herzog’s fanciful 3-D excursion Cave of Forgotten Dreams, released in 2010.
We live now, however, in the era of what might be called “democratic tourism.” Nothing is off limits and if it is, it’s more opportunity than impediment. After closing their respective sites, both Lascaux, a World Heritage Site since 1979, and Altamira, a World Heritage Site since 1985, constructed representations of varying sizes, detail and format near their original locations.
These faux facilities have enjoyed considerable success – Lascaux reported an impressive 300,000 sightseers in 2010, Altamira 275,000 – but the flattery of imitation, it seems, can go only so far. The Altamira museum may provide a sense of the place, notes its director Jose Antonio Lasheras, “but the emotion? We can’t give that. The emotion can come only from being inside the cave of Altamira.”
Thus, between February, 2014, and February, 2015, – and for the first time since 2002 – the Museo de Altamira agreed to let five visitors in to the actual cave one day a week. They had to wear rubber suits and their visits were timed at just 37 minutes.
This elicited howls from the Spanish and international scientific communities, but the Museo director held firm. This year, another 250 sightseers or so are going to gain entry to the real thing.
Trekking through the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, I felt flashes of the emotion Lasheras spoke of – that shock of recognition, the heady commingling of past with present but only flashes. Perhaps this failure had to do with the crowds pressing ever onward at the behest of the guides, the seemingly unvarying elevation of the walkway through the “caveum” (none of the dips and rises you get in a real cave), the jarring presence every now and then of a modern-looking security door. (Amusingly, in the effort, one supposes, to put the visitor in a suitably reverential frame of mind, no photography is allowed.)
Another drawback is the Caverne’s relative compactness. The overall site, spanning 28 hectares, encompasses numerous interpretive zones, a restaurant, gift shop, temporary exhibition spaces plus an impressive cinema/gallery depicting the human life, flora and fauna of the prehistoric Ardèche. The cave simulation, however, is barely 40 per cent of the area of the original’s 9,000 square metres. Such compression no doubt eliminates the “boring bits” of the original but, like a Reader’s Digest condensation, it’s at the expense of much of the sense of drama.
Intriguingly, there seems to have been some intentionality in this. As David Huguet, head of cultural projects at the Caverne, told me: “We didn’t want an ambiguity between the real [cave] and the false one. That’s why the false cave is included in a building and we do not go down into the underground. We don’t want to lie to people; we say that they’re entering a false cave … and when people go out of the cave, they can see a ‘pillar’ onto which we show and describe how we made this replica.
“The replica is a tool for the conservation of the real cave,” continued Huguet, who’s been coming in and out of the Grotte Chauvet for the past seven years. “The real cave has disappeared from the landscape because of the rockfall that has closed the entrance, so there is a risk that our memory loses this real place, so we duplicate the cave with the scientific team of Chauvet Cave, working very, very closely.”
Fine sentiments indeed, yet it’s clear the tourism division of the Rhône-Alpes Region regards the Caverne du Pont d’Arc as a key element, maybe the key element in its ambition to remake the region as a cultural heritage destination and not simply a gourmet’s or nature-lover’s paradise. Of the four major financial backers of the Caverne’s capital project, Rhône-Alpes has been the biggest, donating roughly $20-million. Moreover, unlike Lascaux, which is closed to the public in January, the Caverne intends to stay open seven days a week all year round.
It’s a good idea. I like to think the false cave will feel most true, most real, on a cold, wet afternoon in, say, early March, when the tourists are fewer, the guides less busy and the vivid, vital drawings on its walls, ersatz though they may be, have the opportunity to cast their spell as the next best thing.
The writer travelled as a guest of Rhône-Alpes Tourisme and Ardèche Tourisme. They did not review or approve this article.