The International Cave Art Centre in the Dordogne, which celebrates the prehistoric art discovered in 1940 known as Lascaux, was inaugurated by President Hollande on Saturday 10 December. The €57m (£48m) centre sits at the foot of the hill where the original cave was found and is built of glass and grey striated concrete – though it also features a replica of the grotto that a teenager, Marcel Ravidat, and his black-and-white mongrel, Robot, stumbled upon 76 years ago.

There are 8,500 square metres of visitor space at what has been dubbed Lascaux 4, along with four exhibition rooms that are linked via indoor and outdoor paths and explore the region’s prehistory using the latest technology. Designed by Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta, the idea was to combine light and opacity in this “incision in the landscape” where dark passageways lead into giant halls.

Each visitor has a digital compagnon de visite that looks as if it has been hewn out of slate, Flintstones-style: a mini touchpad with headphones means visitors can roam freely in the workshops, galleries and exhibition spaces; though in the replica cave there is an expert guide.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Artists at work on the cave art replica at the International Cave Art Centre. Photograph: Département 24. D Nidos

The actual cave discovered by Ravidat, and later explored by him and three of his friends, has been closed to the public for more than 50 years, since it was discovered that merely breathing in the caves was destroying them. A replica (known as Lascaux 2) was opened 200 metres away from the new centre in 1983, but there were concerns that too many visitors on top of the hill were affecting the original cave. Now that it is being superseded by this high-tech cousin, Lascaux 2 will be listed as a French historical monument.

“The idea is to have the two centres running together, with perhaps Lascaux 2 as a focus for school art projects,” says Guillaume Colombo, director of the development.

In terms of visitor numbers, Lascaux 2 is the most popular prehistoric cave in the world, while Lascaux 3 – an 800 sq m kit-form mobile exhibition, made by Périgord’s facsimile workshop, the AFSP – has been travelling the globe since 2012. It is currently in Japan. Colombo expects around 400,000 visitors a year to Lascaux 4.

Fans of prehistory are spoiled in this area of France. The Vézère valley has 147 prehistoric sites, 15 of which are on Unesco’s world heritage list. However, there is nothing to match Lascaux in terms of colour, size, quality and quantity of the images, a cave dubbed by Abbé Breuil, a Catholic priest and the first expert to examine the walls, as the “Sistine chapel of prehistory”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Exterior of the new Centre International d’Art Pariétal, Montignac. Photograph: Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty Images

The centre’s tour begins on the Belvedere rooftop which is covered in vegetation and overlooks Montignac and the hill where the teenager discoverers used to play. A short film in the “digital shelter”, a silver-walled bunker with curved benches and a giant screen, transports visitors back to the Magdalenian period (17,000 to 12,000 years ago) with a tundra landscape, woolly rhinos, lions, bison, deer and Cro-Magnon man preparing pigments and tallow lamps to begin work on the cave walls.

Outside again, a soundtrack of Ravidat whistling for Robot floats through the woods before visitors re-enter the building through a sliding door and are suddenly inside the cave, staring up at the 15-metre scree that the boys slid down 76 years ago, half-imagining they may find a secret treasure chamber from the local château.

In another clever attempt to improve the facsimile cave experience (only the replicas of the celebrated caves of Altamira in northern Spain and Chauvet in the Ardèche are now open to visitors) Lascaux 4 has reproduced the temperature, air pressure, the damp smell and sounds of the cave from 1940. There is also a sense of the darkness beyond, which is absent from other replicas. The centre’s digital devices don’t work in the cave, “It’s a place for contemplation and discovery,” says a guide.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest French president Francois Hollande visits Lascaux 4. Photograph: Regis Duvignau/AFP/Getty Images

The workshop next door has the most celebrated sections of the cave suspended from the ceiling, ultraviolet demonstrations of prehistoric engraving techniques and a display wall projecting archive documents and photographs. Man’s discovery and understanding of cave art is experienced in a theatrical, multimedia show where doors magically open at the end of each sequence. This leads into another dark auditorium for a 20-minute 3D film about Lascaux and art from other caves around the word with a voiceover seemingly coming from the depths of the grotto.

The last exhibition space is the Galerie de l’Imagination: a digital cave where giant touchscreens hang in floating columns and visitors can create their own personal exhibitions by combining modern art and cave art, which are then projected around the room. This can be viewed later on the Lascaux website, via a system activated by guests’ scanned entrance ticket.

Digital photography, laser imaging and 3D-printing techniques have meant the Lascaux 4 facsimile is more an expert forgery than a copy. Around 50 artists and sculptors constructed the cave, reproducing 600 animal images and 400 signs and symbols. The AFSP used “stone-veil” techniques to fire natural materials onto walls. Lascaux 2 had no engravings and displayed only 40% of the cave but Lascaux 4 has managed to reproduce every last flicker: bison shedding their coats, stags’ lavish antlers, fighting ibex, aurochs, a hidden bear, scores of horses, herds during their mating seasons and a single, stick-figure, four-fingered man (with a bird’s head) in a deep pit off the main axial gallery.

• The Centre International d’Art Pariétal, which houses Lascaux 4, is open daily 9am-7pm. Tickets from lascaux.fr, adult €16, child 6-12, €10.40, under-6 free, family pass €44. The site has full wheelchair access

The trip was provided by Atout France , Dordogne-Périgord tourism, and Visit Dordogne Valley

More cave art around France

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pech Merle. Photograph: P Cabrol/AP

Older than the art in Lascaux, the caves of Pech-Merle, near Cahors, include original depictions of woolly mammoths and dappled horses.

• pechmerle.com

The polychrome animals in Font-de-Gaume and the engravings at Les Combarelles accept visitors with advance booking.

• sites-les-eyzies.fr

Rouffignac cave has 250 animal drawings, which can be seen from an underground electric train (which reopens on 2 April 2017).

• grottederouffignac.fr

The caves of Cougnac near Gourdon were discovered a decade after Lascaux and the original cave, with its stunning depictions of mammoths, giant deer and man, is still open to the public.

• grottesdecougnac.com