Pont Saint-Bénézet

The bridge in the nursery song ends in mid-river. Four stone arches leave the Avignon bank of the Rhône and simply stop, with a small chapel perched on one of the piers and the far shore out of reach. What remains is a fragment of a crossing that once ran for about 900 metres to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.

Local tradition credits the first bridge to Bénézet, a shepherd who said he had been ordered by Christ in a vision to build where the river was too violent even for Roman engineers; the story goes that he overcame every obstacle by miracles and that the works brought miraculous cures. A first bridge went up between 1177 and 1185 and was destroyed in 1226, when Louis VIII besieged Avignon. From 1234 it was rebuilt entirely in stone, with 22 arches, a gently curving line that followed the islands of the time, and a deck only 4.9 metres wide. When it was built it was the only fixed crossing of the Rhône between Lyon and the sea, and it joined two powers: the papal lands on the Avignon side and the French kingdom on the other, guarded by the Tour Philippe-le-Bel, which still stands in Villeneuve.

The river won in the end. Floods kept bringing arches down, repairs grew too costly, and by 1644 four arches were missing; a flood in 1669 took more, and the bridge was abandoned. The surviving arches are flattened segments rather than Roman semicircles, the widest spanning almost 36 metres, and the piers carry pointed cutwaters on both sides to break the current. On the second pier sits the Chapel of Saint Nicholas, patron of the Rhône boatmen, built on two levels: a 12th-century lower chapel reached by steps, and an upper chapel consecrated in 1411 that squeezes the walkway to under two metres.

The song made the bridge famous worldwide. A tune with the same title was already popular in the 16th century, but the modern version comes from an 1853 comic opera by Adolphe Adam. Since 1995 the bridge has been part of the UNESCO-listed historic centre of Avignon with the Palace of the Popes and the cathedral.

Getting there

The bridge starts at the edge of Avignon's walled centre, about 0.7 km from the heart of the town and a short walk from the Palace of the Popes. The nearest airport is Avignon-Caumont (AVN), about 9 km away.