Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey

The abbey is what turns Mont-Saint-Michel from a rocky islet in a tidal bay into one of the great silhouettes of Europe. Its church sits on the very summit of the granite mount, and everything else, the crypts, the monastic halls, the village and the ramparts, is stacked beneath it down the slopes, so that the whole island reads as a single pyramid rising out of the sands. At the top of the spire, some 170 metres above the bay, stands a gilded Saint Michael slaying the dragon, made of hammered copper by the sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet and set in place in 1897.

Local tradition tells that in 708 the archangel appeared three times in dreams to Aubert, bishop of Avranches, until he built an oratory on what was then called Mont-Tombe. Benedictine monks were installed in 966 under Duke Richard I of Normandy, and from the eleventh century they raised the Romanesque abbey church on a platform of crypts built out over the falling rock. The great achievement of the thirteenth century is La Merveille, "the Marvel", built on the steep north face between 1211 and 1228: a Gothic block of superimposed halls, from the cellar through the Knights' Hall and the guests' hall up to the refectory and a cloister open to the sky, raised high on the rock above the sea.

History has left its marks in the stone. When the Romanesque choir collapsed in 1421, during the Hundred Years' War, it was rebuilt in the Flamboyant Gothic style, a lighter, lace-like choir completed in the early sixteenth century that contrasts with the heavy Romanesque nave. After the Revolution the abbey became a prison, the "Bastille of the Seas", until 1863; restoration followed its classification as a historic monument, and the neo-Gothic spire and statue gave the mount its present outline. Monks returned in 1969, and since 2001 a small community of the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem keeps the abbey a living place of prayer. The mount and its bay have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.

Getting there

The abbey crowns Mont-Saint-Michel on the coast of Normandy, near the border with Brittany; Fougères is about 39 km away and Rennes-Saint-Jacques Airport (RNS) about 65 km. The nearest railway station is Pontorson, with rail connections from Paris and a shuttle bus to the mount. Cars are left in the mainland car parks about 2.5 km away, from where the free Le Passeur shuttle runs to within a few hundred metres of the gate; the causeway can also be walked in about 40–50 minutes.