Saint Michel d'Aiguilhe
Interesting facts
- Work beneath the main altar in 1955 uncovered a hidden Romanesque treasure: a painted olive-wood Christ, a pectoral cross, an ivory reliquary and fabrics.
- The chapel was consecrated on 18 July 961, and the building work was directed by Truannus, dean of the cathedral of Le Puy.
- The first oratory had a compact square plan crowned by a dome, with three small apses arranged in a cross.
- In the 12th century it was enlarged without foundations, its walls following the irregular outline of the rock's summit.
- The trefoil-arched portal is inlaid with black, grey, red and white stone mosaic, and its lintel shows a pair of sirens.
- Inside are 32 Romanesque capitals, some of them left unfinished by their carvers.
- Frescoes in the choir depict the archangel, the four evangelist symbols and the Heavenly Jerusalem, while a cycle of the Magi covers the nave vault.
- The murals were whitewashed in 1823; drawings made after their cleaning later allowed faded scenes to be restored.
- Lightning struck the bell tower in 1245, and in 1562 Protestants destroyed the chapel's statue of Saint Michael.
- It appeared on France's first list of historic monuments in 1840, and in 2014 viewers voted it the country's fourth favourite monument.
Why it is worth it
The rock the chapel sits on is not scenery — it's the reason the chapel exists. Aiguilhe's needle is a volcanic plug, the solidified throat of a vent that has long since eroded away everything softer around it, leaving an 85-metre spike of basalt standing alone above the town. Getting a building onto its summit at all, in the tenth century, was itself a small feat of engineering, before anyone worried about what to put there.
What went there was a thank-you note in stone. Bishop Godescalc of Le Puy is remembered as one of the earliest people on record to have walked the pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela and back — a journey he undertook around 950, at a time when the route was genuinely dangerous and poorly mapped. He survived it, and had the chapel built on his return in 951 to mark the fact. Centuries before the Camino became the well-worn institution it is today, this was one of the acts that helped make it one.
Word travelled, and by the eleventh century pilgrims were climbing the rock in numbers large enough that the original chapel had to be enlarged. Kings did the climb too — Charles VII, Louis XI and Charles VIII are all recorded among the visitors — up what are now 268 steps cut into the rock, to a chapel dedicated, fittingly, to the archangel traditionally associated with mountaintops and other hard-to-reach high places.
Getting there
Located in Le Puy-en-Velay. Clermont-Ferrand Auvergne airport (CFE) is about 99 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Saint-Michel d'Aiguilhe is a chapel in Aiguilhe, near Le Puy-en-Velay, France. The chapel is reached by 268 steps carved into the rock. It was built in 969 on a volcanic plug 85 metres (279 ft) high. The surface on top of the plug is 57 metres (187 ft) in diameter.
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