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The World Heritage Chauvet Cave Management Plan

  • The Ornate Cave of Pont d’Arc, known as the Chauvet Cave, was discovered on December 18, 1994 by Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire.

    It is located in the Combe d’Estre, a former meander of the Ardèche river which bypasses the natural arch of the Pont d’Arc, crossed by the current river bed. It contains more than 1,000 drawings dating from around – 36,000 years and attributed to the Aurignacian period and culture. It has three very rarely combined characteristics : its age, the quality of its conservation, the profusion and richness of the parietal representations.

    Discover the Chauvet Cave on the web site of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication

It was registered by UNESCO on the World Heritage list on June 22, 2014, on the occasion of the 38th session of the World Heritage Committee in Doha as a masterpiece of human creative genius and unique testimony or at least exceptional of a cultural tradition or of a living or extinct civilization. 

Recognized for its exceptional universal value, the ornate cave of the Pont d’Arc must be, more than ever, protected and preserved in its environment.

As a factor of renewed attractiveness, it is also likely to constitute a new lever for development, the impacts of which need to be controlled and the benefits shared as best as possible in the region.

It also gives local stakeholders a whole new responsibility positioning them in an exemplary challenge that they wanted to take up collectively.

The first management plan for 2012-2017, made it possible to better understand and share the exceptional heritage value of the site, allow local operators to better welcome and manage touristic flows for the benefit of the whole territory and the preservation of its resources, and to forster a dynamic by mobilizing partners and residents around the Grand Project Chauvet Pont d’Arc. 

Building on these achievements, the actors of the territory wished to continue this collective dynamic and to introduce the development and implementation of a second management plan for the period 2018-2022, built around three strategic directions. 

  1. That of improving the protection and the conservation of the Cave, its buffer zone and the surrounding territory.
  2. That of the improvement of the knowledge of the cave and its environment, of the widest possible spreading and appropriation of their heritage value.
  3. That of consolidating the attractiveness of the territory, of better distributing the creation of wealth and of registering its development in the challenges of ecological transition.

The IFREEMIS project is one of the actions selected under the management plan. It is part of the desire to deepen the dynamics initiated around the Chauvet cave and its replica, seeking to strengthen the links between the territory, higher education and research, in particular by creating a resource center on underground environments, nonexistent on French territory and likely to constitute the ferment of a more global approach of these environments.