Conques

The abbey appears as you round a bend in the gorge — gold stone against dark forest, the kind of reveal that stopped medieval pilgrims in their tracks. Conques sits in a wooded valley of southern France so steep and narrow that sunlight reaches the village in shifting angles through the day, and over the abbey's west door the Last Judgement glows with its original paint: heaven on one side, hell on the other, a thousand years of theology carved into a single arch.

The abbey-church of Sainte-Foy has stood on the route to Santiago de Compostela since the eleventh century, and walkers on the way still come down the hill into the village every day. Its tympanum is the Romanesque Last Judgement, 124 coloured figures with little onlookers carved among them who seem to watch you back, and the treasury behind it holds the gold-sheathed reliquary of Sainte Foy, a jewelled statue over a thousand years old that survived every war and revolution. In the 1990s the painter Pierre Soulages gave the church new windows in a translucent glass he developed for it, and the interior fills with a grey, shifting light that changes with every cloud; the abbey's community still sings the evening office beneath it.