Pyrénées-Atlantiques The Sare caves were gradually carved out by water millennium after millennium... Everything began 100 million years ago. A warm sea covered what is now the Basque country. Fifty million years later, the Earth's crust wrinkled, forming the Pyrenees. Sediments from the sea floor were thrown up onto the surface, becoming sandstone and limestone. Despite its hardness, the limestone was gradually dissolved and worn away by water, burrowing into the mountain... The biggest of the natural cavities in the Sare caves is the Lezea cave, which opens onto a huge porch prolonged by hundreds of metres of galleries. The first level, previously the bed of an underground river, was home to fierce cave bears. The upper galleries were home to men.
The Lezea entrance porch (50m wide and 20m high).

One of the first Basques in the Neolithic age.

Vast and well situated, this cave was heavily and regularly occupied by cave dwellers: the oldest traces of scrapers and fragments are at least 45,000 years old (Mousterian). Then come larger numbers of tools (chisels and pointed instruments) about 20,000 years old (Gravettian) and splinters and scraping tools around 13,000 years old (Magdalenian). Men hunted red deer and ibex in the Basque country which they then cooked on hearths on the ground. Their menu was complemented by plants, wild berries and perhaps shell fish from the nearby Atlantic. Nearer our own period, in the Neolithic then Bronze age, Lezea was occupied by livestock farmers, as the numerous fragments of ceramics and animal bones show. In modern times, the cave has been used to store Roman wealth, as a hideout for smugglers, as a refuge and a meeting place. Lezea plunges the visitor into 45,000 years of prehistory and 2,000 years of history...

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