5 places to view beautiful cave art in the world

The Niaux Cave is in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southern France. In a staggering eight miles of underground passages lies a magnificent Palaeolithic rock art gallery. The work was created an amazing 15,000-17,000 years ago and depicts our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors along with the animals in their lives, including horses, bison and ibex, in detailed and skilled paintings. They were discovered in the 1600s which can be seen by some 400-year-old graffiti dotted among the paintings.

This Palaeolithic art gallery dates back 10,000 years and lies in the Pinturas River valley of Argentina’s Patagonia. The beautiful paintings are from varying time periods, by different peoples. However, the fascinating side of this work is a series of handprints, carefully stencilled on the cave’s walls, believed to have been made in around 5,000 BC and are mostly of left hands, indicating the artists held their spraying pipes in their right hands to create the colourful silhouettes.

This one isn’t really a cave and the artist is certainly not prehistoric. Prague artist Reon Argondian (formerly Jan Zahradnik) didn’t want to display his work in a boring gallery and turned an old mill building into the Kingdom of Argondia. Each rough wall is covered in colourful and psychedelic paintings and sculptures, making it into an otherworldly place. The building is in the forests on the small hill of Petrin in Prague, Czech Republic.

Ajanta Caves were carved out of a massive rock face in Maharashtra and took 800 years to complete. There is a series of ornate frescoes featuring masterpieces of Buddhist art. The caves are split into two series, one of which was built in 200 BCE and the other completed around 600 CE. Each of the caves opens into grand halls with the floors and ceilings decorated with details depictions of the Jataka stories of Buddha’s past life. A totally fascinating place to see.

This is a similar complex to the above but is more vast in size. Ellora Caves cover an area of more than two km and consists of 34 Brahmanist, Buddhist and Jainist temples, each intricately carved out of the solid rock of the mountainside, and each filled with works of art. It is unfair to call them caves, due to the incredible workmanship involved in their creation. The work was performed from the 5th to 10th centuries.