Collégiale Notre-Dame-en-Vaux

Châlons-en-Champagne

South of the historic heart of Châlons-en-Champagne, the collegiate church of Notre-Dame-en-Vaux raises its two Romanesque-Gothic spires above the arms of the Mau, the river that once girdled the town with canals. A chapel dedicated to the Virgin already stood outside the walls in the 9th century; after its collapse, a new church was begun in 1157 and blessed as early as 1183, before the Gothic work was completed around 1217. The canons who served it lived beside a 12th-century cloister of which only fragments remain, now reassembled in the neighbouring museum on rue Nicolas-Durand: fifty-five column-statues with grave faces, recovered in excavations in the 20th century, after the demolition of the cloister in the 18th century. In the Middle Ages the building also drew pilgrims who came to venerate the relic known as the "Holy Navel of Christ", attested from the 15th century and destroyed on the bishop's orders in 1707 — a cult now forgotten, but one that tells of the intensity of the Marian devotion attached to this place. A stage on the routes to Compostela, the collegiate church has been inscribed since 1998 on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France. Between Romanesque pillars and Gothic vaults, one still feels here the quiet weight of nine centuries of prayer.

Getting there : Free admission during the day, town centre of Châlons-en-Champagne, a few minutes' walk from the cathedral of Saint-Étienne

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

Ambient sound