{"id":20451,"date":"2025-01-08T00:05:22","date_gmt":"2025-01-07T23:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.we-love-camping.com\/camping-ariege\/"},"modified":"2025-01-12T23:45:56","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T22:45:56","slug":"camping-ariege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.we-love-camping.com\/en\/camping-ariege\/","title":{"rendered":"Camping in Ari\u00e8ge, a 14,000 year journey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
With numerous prehistoric sites and cave paintings dating back over 14,000 years, medieval castles and Cathar sites, the Ari\u00e8ge has a long and rich history. So make the most of your camping holiday in Ari\u00e8ge with your caravan, tent or motorhome to take a trip back in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ari\u00e8ge has 6 caves worth visiting. Not all have been inhabited by man, but the Grotte de Niaux, the Grotte du Mas d’Azil and the Grotte de la Vache bear witness to human occupation dating back 14,000 years, to the time of the Magdalenians, hunter-gatherers who were the last people of the Palaeolithic period. The Salon Noir room in the Niaux cave is the masterpiece of this period. Its walls are decorated with highly realistic black line drawings of animals. The cave was not inhabited, but was used as a sanctuary, so people came especially to the cave to paint the animals they had seen in nature. There are no fewer than 100 representations of animals in the cave, 80% of which can be seen in the Salon Noir. Unlike other great prehistoric caves such as Lascaux or the Chauvet cave, when you visit the Niaux cave you are not visiting a facsimile, but the original cave. Not far away, the Grotte de la Vache is the perfect complement to the Grotte de Niaux. This cave was occupied by humans when the Salon Noir was covered in cave paintings. We can therefore imagine that the men who decorated the Niaux cave, or at least their contemporaries, lived in the Vache cave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n