Lascaux 4 opens in December to rave reviews

A new replica of the stunning Lascaux cave paintings was unveiled Saturday in the Dordogne region of southwest France, more than seven decades after the prehistoric art was first discovered in Montignac, the village at the foot of the hills where the original cave complex is located. 

The new project dubbed "Lascaux 4", which opens to the public on Thursday, aims to recreate the sensations experienced by the four teenage boys who found the cave on September 12, 1940. The spectacular prehistoric art is thought to be 18,000 years old and has been on UNESCO's list of world heritage sites since 1979. 

But tourists have been kept away from the original site since 1963 because the carbon dioxide they exhaled was damaging the paintings, wreaking havoc with the cave's fragile ecosystem. And the early work preparing the site for visitors had also disturbed its environment more than the authorities anticipated. "Lascaux 2", an earlier copy of the site, opened in 1983, but it reproduced only 90 percent of the cave's wall art, 

The new version marks "the first time that we've reconstructed the entire Lascaux cave", "Lascaux 4" took a team of 30 workers four years to complete at a cost of 66 million euros 

. Housed in a half-buried building of concrete and glass, it replicates the dimensions, the artwork and colors of the original cave.

I visited Lascaux 2 this year and was wowed!