Monasteries and Abbeys of the Rhone-Alpes
Welcome back to French Vacation Tips,
This week we are going off-the-beaten track, back the Rhone-Alpes. Rhone-Alpes is a treasure of hidden sites tucked away in the hills and valleys of this picturesque area. It’s our favourite region in France, and is an area where just walking the mountain trails is an amazing experience of vistas, where the people are friendly and hospitable. It’s a particularly fond area for French holidaymakers.
For this trip, you’ll need a car as many of the places are inaccessible or incredibly difficult to get to by public transport. You could use a hire car from centres such as Clermont-Ferrand, Le Puy en Velay, Lyon or Saint Etienne where trains run frequently and the drive would be easy.
We are going to start the trip in Roanne and work back to Lyon.
Charlieu — Benedictine Abbaye of Saint-Fortuné de Charlieu et Couvent des Cordeliers de Charlieu
The village of Charlieu is tucked away in countryside and has an amazing history of silk, religion and the One Hundred Year War.
Charlieu, more recently, was where Yves Saint Laurent made a leopard print silk for a dress made for actress Catherine Deneuve. The silk making industry has a museum, Musee de la Soierie, in the 18th century hospital, definitely worth a visit if you are in the town.
The centre of the town has fine, half-timber buildings that house the town shops and the Maison des Anglais, which was the English headquarters during the Hundred Year War, now houses a chocolate and praline shop.
By far the most interesting thing to visit is the monastery and convent of the Cordeliers. The structures have been restored beautifully and worthy of recording in photos. The most interesting features are the heads of the pillars in the North gallery, which represent the Vices and the Virtues, in particular the ermine (purity), the porcupine (justice), the dog (fidelity), the owl (wisdom), the dragon (controlled evil), the snake (hypocrisy)… Not to be missed either: the cloister galleries (early 15C) decorated with various plant motifs and the 14C single-nave church, featuring three side chapels.
Saint-Priest la Roche — Chateau de la Roche
This stunning little chateau sits in the middle of the Loire River. This is different from any other castle we’ve visited and a pretty place to stop on a sunny day. Depending on the time of year and the level of the water, the chateau rises out of the water, connected to the lakes edge by a causeway!
Inside, the rooms have been created out of backdrops, sound bites and mockups due to its precarious position in the middle of the Villerest dam. All the precious decorations and furniture have been removed due to the frequency of flooding it has experienced.
The earliest written records of the castle date from 1260. It was built on a rocky platform overlooking the Loire river from a height of 30 metres. The fortress allowed a watch to be kept and tolls to be collected for the County of Forez border. The building suffered floods from the Loire more often than attacks from enemies.
In the 17th century, because of repetitive floods, the castle lost its attraction, resembling more and more a fortified house that would become a ruin in later centuries. At the end of the 1900s, an industrialist from Roanne bought the castle and restored it in the Gothic style, intending it as a second home. But the structure was flooded again and descended into disrepair. It was finally bought for a symbolic one franc by St Priest la Roche village in the 1930’s.
The photos in the chateau are fascinating showing the history of flooding and devastation through the ages.
Pommiers — Le Prieuré de Pommiers
Driving into Pommiers one immediately sees the priory that dominates the town and fields. The priory site was first occupied by a Gallo-Roman villa which gave the place a Latin name, Pommaria, ie “orchard”, and some pieces of that history remain. According to tradition, the first monks who came from the Abbey of Nantua who settled in 878 were destined for Sainte-Foy-Saint-Sulpice.
The priory was one of the largest of the Order in the thirteenth century with twelve monks. The prior of the monastery was lord of the village, head of the parish hospital, judge, and spiritual leader of the region. But during the Hundred Years War, the priory was sacked leaving only five monks in the enclosure to protect the priory against robbing bands of soldiers.
In the sixteenth century, the priory house was re-built, building a beautiful renaissance façade on the fortified house where it administers justice. After the Revolution, in 1790, the few monks still living in the Priory left and became a national monument.
The interior of the church has many treasures. Paintings of the fifteenth century and the altar itself is a late antique sarcophagus lid. The architecture includes semicircular arches supported by square pillars that surround three sides of a small courtyard. Under the arches of the cloister opened the kitchen, refectory, chapter house … A beautiful staircase leads to the upper floors and wide corridors leading to the monk’s bedrooms.
Sainte-Croix-En-Jarez
We stumbled upon this monastery when we went driving one time and decided to stop for lunch. Since then we have been back for meals, art exhibitions and the yearly market.
Sainte-Croix-en-Jarez was originally a Carthusian monastery built in the 13th century and most of the houses of the village were once a part of the monastery.
Monks inhabited the monastery up until 1792 when they were evicted during the French Revolution, and the buildings sold to neighbouring families. Following this conversion of the monastery into a village little then changed in the following 200 years.
It is possible to see the village all year round but to see inside the buildings then you will need to take the guided tour organised by the tourist office and open from 1st April to 30th September and then weekends only in winter.
Once through the large stone doorway flanked by two round towers you enter the first of two squares inside the village. All around the square are the attractive buildings of the monastery all in the same brown stone.
To the left there is the entrance to the passageway that links the two squares, Cour des Frères to the Cour des Pères, and which was at one time reserved for the monks. This first square was the monks workshops and an area for growing produce necessary to live in a monastery. The town now holds its yearly market there which has fantastic food stalls.
The second, inner square, Cour des Pères, is surrounded by the monks private rooms. Check out the tunnel that leads you from the square around the incredible walls of this hidden village. The moat is now market gardens tended by the residents using water from the nearby babbling creek.
By chance, we always ended up in Sainte-Croix-en-Jarez in warm weather and it is particularly beautiful during that time of the year.
Thank you for following me on this journey around the Rhone-Alpes, an underrated and ignored area of France that is worthy of several weeks touring if you want to discover the French regional culture.
Next week we’ll visit amongst others my favourite little village and you’ll find out why we love this place.
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Thanks for reading this. Next newsletter will be about Lyon.
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À Bientôt!
