Grande Chartreuse

Interesting facts

The rockfall that destroyed the first monastery on 30 January 1132 killed seven monks; two chapels still mark the original site higher up the valley.

According to tradition, the recipe for Chartreuse came to the monks in 1605 as a manuscript from Marshal François-Annibal d'Estrées; the liqueur uses about 130 plants.

The monks worked on the formula for more than a century, and by 1764 demand for their Elixir Végétal forced the first expansion of the distillery.

When filmmaker Philip Gröning asked to film the monks in 1984, they replied that they needed time to think; their answer came 16 years later.

Gröning lived at the monastery for six months in 2002–2003, filming alone and without artificial light, and the result runs 162 minutes with no commentary.

During the Revolution its library of some 400 manuscripts and 3,500 printed books, including about 300 incunabula, was taken to Grenoble, where it remains.

In April 1903 troops forcibly expelled the monks, who found refuge at the charterhouse of Farneta near Lucca in Italy.

From the 12th century until the Revolution the monks also mined iron at the Col de Bovinant and ran forges in the massif.

During the Second World War the returned community sheltered Jews and others fleeing persecution.

The monastery belongs to the French state and is leased to the Carthusian order, which in 1999 sent two of its monks to found a charterhouse in South Korea.

Why it is worth it

In a narrow, wooded valley of the Chartreuse massif north of Grenoble lies the mother house of the Carthusian order, one of the strictest communities in the Christian world. In 1084 Saint Bruno and six companions, guided by Bishop Hugh of Grenoble, settled in this "desert" to live as hermits in community. The first monastery was destroyed in 1132 by a rockfall that swept snow before it; Prior Guigo rebuilt two kilometres lower down, on a site sheltered from falling stone, and wrote the Customs that still govern Carthusian life.

The buildings seen today date from the reconstruction led by Dom Innocent Le Masson after a fire in 1676, the last of eight between 1320 and 1676; wooden shingle roofs made each fire total. The monks were expelled at the Revolution, returned in 1838, were driven out again under the anti-congregation laws of the early 1900s and came back only in 1940. The liqueur that shares the monastery's name — its recipe said to have reached the monks in 1605 — has long supported the order. Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse", Wordsworth and Ruskin all drew on the place, and Philip Gröning's wordless film Into Great Silence (2005) showed its daily life.

The monastery does not open to visitors, and that is the point: the valley is a protected zone of silence, closed to cars, and the approach roads stop well short of the gate. Cars stop about a kilometre and a half from the monastery; what a visitor sees is the setting of the valley and the monastery from outside. The history and daily routine of the monks are explained in the museum installed in La Correrie, the lower house where the lay brothers once lived and worked, with reconstructed monastic cells.

Getting there

The monastery lies in the commune of Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, about 17 km from Meylan on the edge of Grenoble. The Musée de la Grande Chartreuse is at La Correrie, 670 Route du Désert, open seasonally from late March to November. The nearest airport is Chambéry-Savoie (CMF), about 31 km away; Grenoble is the usual base.

Grande Chartreuse

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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