Les Combarelles is a narrow cave two kilometres east of Les Eyzies containing over 600 engravings — the largest concentration of Paleolithic animal engravings in France. Where Font-de-Gaume dazzles with paint and colour, Les Combarelles rewards patience: the engravings are cut into the rock with a burin, and you need your guide's torch held at a raking angle to make out the overlapping figures. Horses, bison, mammoths, lions, bears, rhinoceroses, and ibex emerge from what at first looks like a chaotic mesh of scratched lines.
The cave is tiny — just over a metre wide in places — and tours are kept to four or five people. The intimacy is part of the experience: you press through the same narrow passage that Magdalenian artists squeezed through 13,000 years ago, doing their work with stone lamps in the dark. Visits are by guided tour only, and slots fill quickly in summer. Book alongside your Font-de-Gaume ticket; the two caves are complementary rather than competitive.