Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert

The gorge swallows you. The road narrows, the limestone walls rise, and the abbey appears at a bend in the Hérault — golden stone in a green cleft, exactly the kind of place a Carolingian knight would choose to renounce the world. Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert in France sits at the bottom of this gorge, its medieval lanes climbing from the river to the cloister where fragments of carved columns remember the ones now in New York.

Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert was founded by Guilhem, Duke of Aquitaine and a companion of Charlemagne, who established the abbey here in 804 AD and spent the last years of his life in monastic retreat. The abbey cloister's carved columns were sold in the early 20th century and now form part of the collection at The Cloisters museum in New York — plaster casts replace the originals in the village. The village sits within the gorge of the Hérault river, on the GR de Pays trail that connects it to the medieval Pont du Diable downstream. The Hérault below the village offers natural swimming holes — turquoise water in limestone pools — that draw summer visitors to one of the finest wild-swimming sites in southern France. Saint-Guilhem holds both Plus Beau Village de France designation and UNESCO World Heritage status as part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela.