Église monolithe, Saint-Émilion

Beneath the squares of Saint-Émilion lies the largest underground church in Europe, hollowed out of the limestone hill on which the medieval town is built. From the market square you see only a Gothic portal and some tall windows set into the rock face, with a bell tower rising above. Behind them is a church with a nave and two aisles of almost equal size, divided into six bays by massive pillars left standing in the stone as it was dug out. The nave is about eleven metres high, and some 15,000 cubic metres of rock were removed to make it.

The town takes its name from Émilion, a Breton monk who, by tradition, settled here as a hermit in the 8th century and died in 767; his followers are said to have dug a first modest cavity in the stone after his death. The church itself was carved in the late 11th or early 12th century, probably under Benedictine monks. An inscription on a pillar records its dedication to Saint Émilion. One theory credits Pierre de Castillon, viscount of Aubeterre, who had a similar church cut at Aubeterre-sur-Dronne and is thought to have used the saint's relics to draw pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela. The work was done from the top downwards, a technique compared with that of the rock churches of Cappadocia. A tower was raised over the church in the 12th century, the Gothic windows and portal were cut in the 14th, and the 53-metre spire was added in the 16th.

Little of the original decoration has survived. After the French Revolution the church was sold and used to make saltpetre for gunpowder, and the scraping of the walls destroyed almost all the carvings; only a few reliefs in awkward corners, under the vault of the choir and on the pillars, remain. Medieval catacombs adjoin the access gallery. The church became a protected historic monument in 1886, its bell tower in 1907, and in 1996 it appeared on the World Monuments Watch because of water seepage and the instability of the tower. Its foundations and pillars have since been strengthened. In 1999 the whole Jurisdiction of Saint-Émilion, a wine landscape of vineyards, villages and churches, was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The church is in the centre of Saint-Émilion, about 7 km east of Libourne. The nearest airport is Bordeaux–Mérignac (BOD), about 45 km away. Saint-Émilion station, on the railway line from Libourne towards Bergerac, lies about 1.5 km south of the old town.