Can You Visit Chauvet Cave?

The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in the Ardèche department of southeastern France is a cave that contains some of the best-preserved figurative cave paintings in the world, as well as other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life.

Can you visit the real Chauvet Cave?

At Chauvet, however, Just 200 scientific researchers and conservators are permitted inside each year. Bardisa says that as long as they stringently restrict access and closely monitor the cave, it can continue in its present state for the foreseeable future.

Why is the Chauvet Cave not open to the public?

Although it has been on Unesco's World Heritage list since 2014, it has not been open to the public to protect the paintings from fungal damage, which happened at Lascaux cave. In 2015, a replica of Chauvet, the Caverne du Pont-d'Arc, opened less than a kilometre away from the original.