Abbaye de Bonnevaux

Villeneuve-de-Marc

Of all the Cistercian abbeys of France, Bonnevaux is surely the one that has most completely disappeared — and yet its history was immense. Founded in 1117 by Guy of Burgundy, Archbishop of Vienne, who would become pope the following year as Callixtus II, it grew into a monastic hearth so fertile that it in turn sent out three daughter abbeys: Tamié, Léoncel and Mazan. Its first abbot, John, had nonetheless begun by fleeing his vocation: having left the cloister to set off on pilgrimage to Compostela, he is said to have been visited on the road by Christ himself, accompanied by Saint Peter and Saint James, who came to summon him back to his charge — an episode which, in the medieval imagination, seals the supernatural legitimacy of the Bonnevaux line. But the Revolution proved fatal to the abbey: sold as national property, it served as a stone quarry and disappeared methodically throughout the 19th century, stone by stone, until nothing of it remained. In 1933 the monks of Tamié, its spiritual daughter still alive in Savoy, returned to plant a cross on the site of their mother house swallowed by the forest. Today, walkers and ramblers crossing the vast forested massif of Bonnevaux, between ponds and undergrowth, have only this solitary cross to tell them that they are walking in the footsteps of one of the most prolific cradles of Alpine Cistercian monasticism.

Getting there : In the heart of the forest of Bonnevaux, commune of Villeneuve-de-Marc, Isère; reached by a waymarked footpath from the village

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

Ambient sound