Rocamadour

During our week in Collonges-la-Rouge, we took an afternoon trip to Rocamadour. It is a beautiful and historic medieval village built right into a high rock cliff. There are village houses and a pedestrian street on the lower level (Citè Pietonne), churches halfway up (Citè Religieuse), and then the grand castle at the top. We visited the church of Notre-Dame, where the strange but famous Black Madonna statue is enshrined. The fortified gateways on the lower level were especially cool.

Rocamadour is well-known as a site of pilgrimage, en-route to the more famous site of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. We walked the long path (called the Grand Escalier: 216 steps) that leads from the bottom and winds up to the top. (There is an elevator, but not for free!) Apparently pilgrims used to do this on their knees. At the switchbacks you find “stations of the cross” at which they would stop and do their recitations. It was very interesting. It was a long and steep path, made a little easier today because it is well worn, no doubt by countless New Balances and Nikes. The view from the top was beautiful. We saw a hot air balloon and some eagles.

While this is a neat place to go for a little while, I wouldn’t recommend it for a long destination. There were hordes of people everywhere, and it wasn’t even high season. Granted, there was a hot air balloon festival going on, but apparently it stays crowded a lot. The tourists now far outnumber the pilgrims, and all the houses have been turned into trinket souvenir shops, but with some imagination you can see how it must have been back in the Middle Ages.