Conques

Why go

Conques is about as far from a capital city as France gets: a few hundred inhabitants, no through traffic, and a village of stone and timber clinging to a steep slope above the river Dourdou. At its heart is one of the great Romanesque churches of Europe, still a stop on the pilgrim road to Santiago. Stay the night if you can: when the day visitors leave, the lanes empty and the abbey belongs to the walkers and to the silence of the valley.

History

A community of monks was established in this remote valley by the early ninth century, but for decades it had nothing to draw pilgrims. The solution, according to the abbey’s own tradition, was theft: in the second half of the ninth century a monk of Conques spent years among the clergy of Agen, gained their trust, and carried off the relics of Saint Faith, a young martyr of the early fourth century. Medieval writers saw no shame in such ‘holy thefts'.

The miracles attributed to the saint made Conques famous, and the abbey became a major stop on the road from Le Puy to Santiago de Compostela. The wealth that pilgrims brought paid for the present abbey church, built from the eleventh century and completed early in the twelfth, and for its treasure, centred on the Majesty of Saint Faith, a seated reliquary statue covered in gold and gems whose core dates from the ninth or tenth century.

Over the church’s west door, the sculptors of the early twelfth century carved a Last Judgement: Christ in majesty between the saved and the damned, with devils, monsters and a lively hell. Much of its original paint still survives. After the Middle Ages the abbey declined, and by the nineteenth century the church was close to ruin. Prosper Mérimée, inspector of historic monuments, visited in 1837 and raised the alarm; it was listed in 1840 and restored.

The modern chapter came in glass. Between the late 1980s and 1994 the painter Pierre Soulages, a native of nearby Rodez, designed 104 windows of translucent, colourless glass that fill the church with soft, changing light. The abbey church was inscribed by UNESCO in 1998 as part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France. Since 2016 Conques has been part of the commune of Conques-en-Rouergue.

UNESCO World Heritage: Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France (1998), for the abbey church of Sainte-Foy

Member of the association Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. The Plus Beaux Villages de France by train →