Sarlat-la-Canéda

Why go

Sarlat is the town the French chose to save first. Its medieval and Renaissance centre was the first place restored under the 1962 Malraux law, and the result is a whole town of ochre limestone, steep stone roofs and carved doorways, with very little modern intrusion. Add a Saturday market heaped with walnuts, mushrooms and duck, and the Dordogne valley’s castles a few kilometres away, and it is everything Paris is not: slow, rural and built around the table.

History

Sarlat grew around a Benedictine abbey whose origins are lost in legend; historians place its foundation in the first half of the ninth century, in Carolingian times. The abbey prospered, the town grew up at its gates, and in 1317-1318 Pope John XXII made Sarlat the seat of a new bishopric, with the abbey church as its cathedral.

The Hundred Years’ War brought Sarlat into English hands under the treaty of Brétigny in 1360, but about ten years later, as Bertrand du Guesclin pushed the English back, the town returned to the French king. After the war ended in the 1450s, a long period of prosperity began: merchants, lawyers and churchmen built the stone town houses, with towers, galleries and mullioned windows, that still line the streets.

The most famous Sarladais of that age was Étienne de La Boétie, born here in 1530, magistrate and author of the ‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude', and the close friend whose early death Montaigne mourned in his Essays. His family’s Renaissance house faces the cathedral.

Then the town fell out of the main currents of history and, crucially, was never rich enough to rebuild. By the twentieth century the old centre was crumbling. The Malraux law of 4 August 1962 created protected historic districts, and Sarlat, with its sector established in 1964, became the first town where the law was put into practice. Decades of restoration followed, including the conversion of the former church of Sainte-Marie into a covered market by the architect Jean Nouvel, who grew up in Sarlat, around 2000.