Hortus, Archaeological site and mountain in Valflaunès, France

Hortus is a 512-metre limestone mountain in the commune of Valflaunès, about 20 km north of Montpellier, facing the Pic Saint-Loup. Its southern edge is a white Cretaceous limestone cliff over 100 metres high and more than a kilometre wide, weathered into horizontal ledges and vertical fractures, with dark green garrigue and woodland below and a wooded plateau above.

The Hortus cave's porch was excavated over a wide trench, revealing several metres of stratigraphy. Neanderthals sheltered there between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago, leaving Mousterian points, blades and scrapers plus about a hundred human bone fragments, many jawbones. The sequence then shows no Upper Palaeolithic material, but regular Neolithic (Chasséen, Ferrières) to Chalcolithic and Late Bronze Age occupation.

The vineyards on the slopes of the Hortus and the neighbouring Pic Saint-Loup produce the Pic-Saint-Loup cru, granted its own appellation d'origine contrôlée in January 2017. The name Hortus is Latin for "garden", and the Occitan form Òrtols is still used locally. A legend tells of a shepherd and a shepherdess fleeing a forced marriage; a giant split the mountain with a punch so they could escape.

The climbing face holds about sixty routes graded sixth to eighth degree, reached from the D122 road that runs up to just below the summit plateau. The limestone is vertical and fractured, and the routes are considered harder than those on the north face of the neighbouring Pic Saint-Loup. The cave and cliffs are a bat roost, so the underground passages are not open to visitors.

The Hortus cave is a transit roost for Schreiber's bent-winged bat and the Mediterranean horseshoe bat, whose numbers there once reached nearly 1,000 individuals in spring and autumn. Six of the 17 bat species recorded are cave-dwelling and threatened across Europe, which helped make the site part of the Natura 2000 "Pic Saint-Loup" area.