Visit France > Aquitaine > Périgord > Villars

Day 5 - Geese, Châteaux and Caves
by car… or better yet, on bicycle! 

If you leave from the Moulin de l'Abbaye in Brantôme, I recommend that you go by bicycle. It's a beautiful and scenic trip through a forest of chestnut trees, little frequented by cars.

You'll head first of all to the château of Puyguilhem situated about 20 km from Brantôme, which was in fact a Renaissance hunting lodge.

Château de Puyguilhem

You can combine a visit to the château with a trip to the caves at Villars. You'll pass Lachapelle-Faussé where you'll see flocks of geese in the fields: a perfect country scene with shepherds, apple trees, and in their shade, the geese enjoying the cool. You can see them until the fall. Then they enter a period of force-feeding as soon as the corn is harvested. This jaunt is best enjoyed on bicycle, since in a car, everything will pass by too quickly. You can even stop at the goose farm: you'll encounter the ever-present Perigordian hospitality and they'll be pleased to open the gate for you.

The Villars cave is small, but inside you'll find absolutely everything that is found in the bigger caves of Black Perigord. It was discovered in 1953 by the Périgueux spelunking club. The visitable area is part of an immense network, 13 km of which have been topographically charted so far. You'll find all kinds of concretions, from the most impressive calcite flows to needle-thin stalactites, translucent curtains, rimstone pools, countless stalagmites, and prehistoric paintings. Under a thin film of calcite that gives them their unique blue colour, you can admire a mural of horses as well as the famous scene of the sorcerer and the bison, one of the rare examples of prehistoric human art.