The cave you cannot enter, rebuilt
A full-scale replica of the Chauvet cave, rebuilding 36,000-year-old paintings of lions, bears and rhinos panel by panel.
Audio-guided departures cap at about 75 places and the French-guided ones at 28. Last admission is two hours before closing.
Tickets
Both cover the whole site — the cave replica, the Aurignacian Gallery, the 360° room and the park. Under-10s are free and go on the booking at no charge.
Ages 18 and over
€32per person
What the ticket covers
Ages 10 to 17
€17per person
What the ticket covers
Choose an audio-guided departure if you do not speak French.
Booking with us
Your currency, final price, no fees added.
We pick the audio-guided time you can actually use.
Mobile ticket in your inbox, nothing to collect.
English-speaking concierge, not an autoresponder.
Before you pick a time
Two kinds of departure walk the same chambers, and the difference decides whether you understand a word of it.
French, English, German, Dutch and Spanish. Around 75 places, which is why these times survive longest in the calendar.
Led in person, French only, around 28 places. These go first — which is how a date can look full when the audio times are still open.
Inside
Every panel here was reproduced from laser surveys of the original chambers, at full size and on rock moulded to match.
The original
Three cavers follow a draught of air into the painted chambers on 18 December. The cave is closed within weeks.
UNESCO inscribes the original cave on the World Heritage List on 22 June. It stays shut.
The reconstruction opens on 25 April, ten kilometres away and built from laser surveys of the real thing.
On 18 December 1994 three cavers — Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire — squeezed through a draught of air in a cliff above the Ardèche and found a gallery no one had entered for tens of thousands of years. The floor still held bear hollows. The walls held hundreds of animals drawn in charcoal and red ochre.
The cave was sealed almost immediately and has never opened to the public. Its air, its floor and its pigment are too fragile to share. In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the original cave on the World Heritage List, and it remains shut.
What you can walk into is here, ten kilometres away above Vallon-Pont-d'Arc. Grotte Chauvet 2 reproduces the painted chambers at full size across 8,180 m² of moulded rock, the largest decorated cave replica anywhere. The panels were copied from laser surveys of the original, down to the grain of the wall and the smudge of a palm.
You get lions with their ears flat in a hunt, a herd of rhinos, bears, a leopard, an owl turning its head. At least thirteen species, many of them predators that almost never appear in Ice Age art. The oldest charcoal here has been dated to roughly 36,000 years ago.
Plan the day
Reading
Written by us, updated when the operator changes something.
Questions
No, and no ticket anywhere buys you that. The original cave has been sealed since it was found in 1994 to protect the paintings and the air inside. Grotte Chauvet 2 is the full-scale reconstruction of its painted chambers, built from laser surveys of the original.
Timed entry to the cave replica, the Aurignacian Gallery, the 360° sound-and-light room, the park and whatever activities are scheduled that day. Allow about three and a half hours for the whole site, of which roughly an hour is underground.
Yes. Audio-guided departures run in English, German, Dutch and Spanish as well as French. The separate guided departures are in French only, so if you do not speak French, take an audio-guided time. We book the language you ask for.
Audio-guided departures hold roughly 75 places and the French-guided ones about 28, so the guided times go first. School holidays and summer weekends are the pressure points. Outside those, a few days ahead is usually enough.
Yes, including babies. Under-10s are admitted free by the operator, so we do not charge for them, but they still need a ticket in the booking. Tell us how many are coming and we will add them at no cost.
Around 15°C all year, because the building holds a cave climate. That is pleasant in August and cool in January. Bring a layer whatever the season, since you will be standing still for much of the hour.
The walk is flat, lit and about an hour long, which most children over five manage. Under-fives can find the dark and the quiet difficult. Pushchairs are not practical inside the cave building.
The cave route was built level and step-free, unlike the original cave, and the galleries and park are on made paths. Contact us before booking if you need specifics on the route or parking, and we will check with the operator for your date.
Photography without flash is generally allowed inside the replica, which is one of the freedoms a reconstruction gives you. Rules can change for specific events, so follow the signs and the staff on the day.
We buy the official admission for your chosen date and departure, then send your ticket by email. If the departure you asked for is gone by the time we reach the operator, we come back to you with the nearest alternatives before anything is confirmed.
Ask us as early as you can. Changes depend on what the operator still has open for the new date, and close to the day there is often nothing left to move into.
You are refunded in full to your original payment method. We do not hold your money against a departure we could not secure.
Yes, free on site, signposted from the Route de Bourg Saint-Andéol. Arrive with time in hand in summer, when the car park fills around midday.
There is a restaurant and a café, and a picnic area in the park. The park itself is worth the time between your arrival and your cave departure rather than sitting in the car.
There is no station at Vallon-Pont-d'Arc. Regional coaches run from Montélimar and Aubenas, and taxis work from Vallon-Pont-d'Arc itself. Most visitors drive, a little over two hours from Lyon.
Yes, the natural rock arch over the Ardèche is a few kilometres down the road from the site and free to look at. It pairs well with a morning at the cave and an afternoon by the river.
Yes, and they are not the same visit. Lascaux is dominated by horses, aurochs and deer; Chauvet is weighted towards predators — lions, bears, a leopard, hyenas, rhinos — and its charcoal is roughly ten thousand years older. If you liked one you will very likely want the other.
A 2012 study placed the art in the Aurignacian at about 32,000 to 30,000 years ago, and 2020 research put the oldest painting near 36,500 years. Dating cave art is contested, so treat any single figure as an estimate with a range around it.
It was built from laser surveys of the original and reproduces the panels at full size, including the shape of the rock they sit on. It is a reconstruction rather than an interpretation, which is why the scale and the awkward angles of the originals survive in it.
No. The reconstruction covers the painted chambers, not every metre of the original system. What it does cover, it covers at full size rather than in miniature.
Aven d'Orgnac is about twenty minutes south and is a genuine cave with its own guided visits. Doing both in a day works, though it makes for a long one with children.
It is a few kilometres away, free, and takes ten minutes to look at from the road. In summer it is also where the canoes launch, so parking gets competitive by mid-morning.
On a wet Tuesday in February you would probably walk up and get in. The risk is not the site being full, it is the departure in your language being full, and in the holidays that happens well before the site does.
A separate departure where a guide carries a torch through the chambers, which is closer to how the original was lit. It runs on Saturdays outside school holidays, in French only, from age seven.
en.grottechauvet2ardeche.com · grottechauvet2ardeche.tickeasy.com · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · whc.unesco.org · www.wikidata.org ·
Who we are
Chauvet 2 Tickets is an independent booking service. We buy official admission on your behalf from the operator of Grotte Chauvet 2 – Ardèche and handle the booking admin, the time-slot choice and the questions, so you do not have to work through a French-language ticket system. We are not the operator and we are not affiliated with it.