Carnac
The Standing Stones
A self-guided audio tour with offline listening, optional directions between chapters, and free previews before you go.
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Over 3,000 standing stones arranged in roughly parallel rows, stretching for miles across the Brittany countryside. The largest megalithic site on Earth. And nobody knows why it's here. The stones were erected over a period of about a thousand years, between 4500 and 3300 BCE. That's older than the Great Pyramid by a millennium. Older than Stonehenge by almost as much.
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Tour chapters
13 min audio | 3 stops
Start with Carnac's central alignment landscape: the overwhelming rows, the lunar hypothesis, and the visitor-center warning that much of the evidence is damaged. This short walk keeps the route focused on the core stones and the modern frame that admits how much of the original megalithic system was lost before archaeology could read it.
Over 3,000 standing stones arranged in roughly parallel rows, stretching for miles across the Brittany countryside. The largest megalithic site on Earth. And nobody knows why it's here. The stones were erected over a period of about a thousand years, between 4500 and 3300 BCE. That's older than the Great Pyramid by a millennium. Older than Stonehenge by almost as much.
Carnac Standing Stones
Let's talk about what you might actually be standing inside.
Alignements de Kermario
Carnac's mystery is not only that the stones are old. It is that the original system was damaged by farming, roads, collecting, tourism, and development before modern archaeology could read it.
Maison des Megalithes, Carnac
28 min audio | 7 stops
Drive the wider Carnac and Gulf of Morbihan route from chapel-topped tumulus, stripped dolmen, Le Manio, and Kerlescan to Locmariaquer's broken giant, the Table des Marchands, and Gavrinis across the water. These stops turn the stone rows into a regional system of tombs, reused monoliths, elite burial, thresholds, and memory carried across the gulf.
The chapel-topped hill above Carnac is a Neolithic elite tomb whose grave goods reveal power, exchange, and prestige before written France existed.
Tumulus Saint-Michel
Kercado looks like a stone table only after the mound is stripped from the story. Read it as a chambered ancestor place, not a ruin of random slabs.
Dolmen de Kercado
At Le Manio, rows of menhirs cross an older burial mound, a quadrilateral marks a vanished tomb, and a six-meter stone turns the landscape into layered construction.
Le Manio and the Giant of Manio
Kerlescan's thirteen rows converge toward enclosure and mound, making the stones feel less like a line of markers and more like a controlled passage between spaces.
Kerlescan Alignments
The broken Grand Menhir at Locmariaquer was once a 20.6-meter monolith, turning Neolithic Brittany's ambition into a question of transport, labor, and collapse.
Grand Menhir Brise
The Table des Marchands is not just a passage grave with carvings. Excavation showed it was built around an earlier decorated stele, making reuse part of the monument's original logic.
Table des Marchands
Gavrinis is famous for its engraved passage, but the deeper layer is that its capstone appears to be part of the same broken monolith system as Locmariaquer.
Cairn de Gavrinis