Cathédrale Saint-Pierre d'Angoulême

Angoulême

On the highest point of the Angoulême promontory, Bishop Girard II launched around 1110 an extraordinary building project, consecrated as early as 1128: a cathedral without aisles, covered by a row of domes that flood the nave with light. But it is outside that the traveller stops. The west front, some twenty metres high, displays around seventy carved figures, a veritable page of stone open to the sky: at the top, the Christ of the Ascension surrounded by the symbols of the evangelists; below, humanity summoned to the Judgement, the elect and the damned separated for ever. And in the lower register, a unique surprise: a warlike frieze in which historians recognise episodes from the Chanson de Roland — one of the oldest translations into stone of the great epic poem, carved around 1115–1130, at the very moment when the minstrels were singing it along the pilgrimage roads. Turpin, Roland and the Saracens thus do battle on the walls of a cathedral, as if to recall that the crusade in Spain passed through Aquitaine. In the 19th century, the local-born Paul Abadie — future architect of the Sacré-Cœur — restored the building from 1852 to 1875 with a freedom that has remained notorious: towers heightened, sculptures recreated, the facade largely reworked. Today one reads the two eras superimposed, the Romanesque dream and its Romantic reinterpretation, from the forecourt overlooking the roofs of the Anguienne valley.

Getting there : Place Saint-Pierre, on the south-western edge of the Angoulême plateau. Reached on foot from the town centre (Rempart Desaix); town-centre car parks a few minutes away. Free admission.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound