So we started off the day by visiting the Cathedral. The Cathedral sits on top of the hill and is quite large. Everything is very old, but the styles were so very mixed inside that one could see where the additions were over the years. We saw the treasury room which had some old things from the church back in the day, including these sweet clothe shoes for the bishop and the old bishops ring and staff. The inside of the church had huge wooden walls so it was like a box inside a box. Inside of the wooden part was the altar. There is also a very impressive looking organ!
Wooden wall, also doubles as chairs
Wish I could have heard it!
Altar
In the cloisters
After the Cathedral, we headed down the hill to see the old Roman bath ruins. The Romans were the first to make thermal baths. They achieved this by running heat in the floor beneath. They had slaves who would stay all day in the "basement" putting wood into the fire to heat them. The baths had three different segments, rooms for sweating, rooms for warming up and for cooling down. Not much was left, but it was still interesting.
Me in front of the ruins with the Cathedral in the background
After seeing the ruins, we went and had a five course meal on a farm. They make all of the food there, so it's completely natural and fresh. It was all quite delicious! We had vegetable soup, salad, potatoes, chicken off the rotisserie, cheese and cake.
Last stop was to see the caves of Gargas. These caves are famous for housing hundreds of stenciled paintings of hands. It was my first time in real caves! It was a little creepy at first because there is a door leading to it with a key, so when our tour guide closed and locked it, well it was a little scary. haha But it was well lit and it was very open. Even without the paintings the caves themselves were awesome! The rocks looked like frozen waterfalls. There wasn't a smooth surface to be seen. These caves are so old and well preserved that they limit the amount of visitors per day and there is no photography inside. (The following pictures, I found online) We weren't even allowed to touch the walls!
It was really cool to see the "pouchoirs" or the hand stencils because I studied them in my art history class. They were created by mixing oils and water, putting it into their mouths and blowing it through a pipe onto the wall. Most of them are in black and red, but there are a few in yellow and white.
The mystery of these hands are that they have short fingers. Sometimes it will be all of them that are short, or sometimes just one, but the thumb is always present. The most recent theory is that the hands were a form of communication and the different positioning of fingers represented different things. These hand paintings are found in many different caves all over the world!
There were also a couple of paintings and carvings of animals such as goats and bison in the caves. We think that these were carved in places that were considered sacred to the people and they were often made in more obscure places. I can't imagine navigating those caves in such little light, none-the-less making paintings! There was also a little nook that was considered the fertility nook. They had painted the inside red with a hole in the center representing a vagina.
We finished the tour with an interactive museum where we could make our own pouchoirs and see the paintings up closer. It was also a beautiful sunny day and the scenery in the area was gorgeous!
Donkey, a lot bigger than represented in Shrek...
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