Villers Abbey

The ruins of Villers Abbey fill a narrow, wooded bend of the Thyle valley in Walloon Brabant: roofless Gothic walls, tall empty windows and the round openings of the church rising among trees, with the cloister, refectory and monastic quarters spread out around them. Since the nineteenth century the site has been one of the most celebrated romantic ruins in the Low Countries.

The abbey was founded in 1146, when a small community from Clairvaux, Bernard of Clairvaux's own monastery, arrived on land granted by the lord of Marbais. Local tradition holds that the monks first settled on a drier spot about a kilometre to the south and, hungry and discouraged, almost gave up before moving to the present site. That site was a marshy, rocky fold where the river makes a double bend, and the monks transformed it: they drained the ground, raised it with fill and vaulted the Thyle itself so that the abbey could be built over the river, an undertaking unmatched in other Cistercian houses. A watermill built around 1197–1200 kept working until 1897. Protected by the dukes of Brabant, Villers reached its height in the thirteenth century, when its estates covered some 100 square kilometres and contemporary accounts, perhaps exaggerated, spoke of around 100 monks and 300 lay brothers. Dukes Henry II and John III of Brabant were buried here, along with the mystic Juliana of Liège and the crusader-turned-monk Gobert of Aspremont.

The abbey church, about 94 metres long with nave vaults that rose to 23 metres, was begun in 1197 in the Romanesque style, as its porch still shows, and continued from 1210 in Gothic until 1267, making it one of the earliest Gothic buildings in Belgium. Its east end is famous for unusual groupings of round oculus windows. The monks' refectory, built around 1240, is a two-aisled hall whose rib vaults rested on a row of five columns; the eighteenth century added a neoclassical abbot's palace with formal gardens and a new church front. Decline came with the wars of the sixteenth century, when Spanish troops damaged the church and cloister in 1544, and in 1796, after the French Revolution, the monks were expelled and the buildings were left to decay. By the 1830s the ruins had become a destination for romantic travellers, and the railway between Louvain and Charleroi, opened in 1855 straight through the old grounds, brought visitors from Brussels. Victor Hugo came several times in the 1860s and drew on the abbey's cells for a passage of Les Misérables. The ruins are now listed as part of the major heritage of Wallonia.

Getting there

The abbey is in Villers-la-Ville, about 17 km east of Nivelles; the nearest city is Fleurus, about 12 km away. The nearest airport is Brussels South Charleroi Airport (CRL), about 15 km away. The railway between Ottignies and Charleroi runs past the ruins.