Notre-Dame-de-la-fin-des-Terres

Notre-Dame church, view of the choir, which is partly silted up in the dune

View through the nave to the choir

The Roman Catholic parish church of Notre-Dame-de-la-fin-des-Terres is a former Benedictine monastery church in Soulac-sur-Mer in the Gironde department in France . Since 1998, the church has been listed as part of the UNESCO World Heritage “ Camino de Santiago in France”. The church has been classified as a monument historique since 1891 .

history

The Church of Notre-Dame was built as a priory church of the Benedictine abbey of Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux and was threatened with silting up in the dunes from the start . There are deeds from the 12th and 13th centuries about donations that apparently served to compensate for the progressive silting up: the church floor was raised by several meters, the portal was moved from the south to the west side. Eventually the choir and the entire ground floor of the monastery had to be abandoned. In 1741 the church was finally given up.

With the relocation of the place, the church should also be rebuilt. It was planned to use material from the old church for this purpose. However, this failed due to an objection from the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce : The church tower , which was still sticking out of the sand, served as an indispensable signpost for the ships entering the Gironde .

By the middle of the 19th century the dune had moved on and the church had been opened again. In 1846 a delegation from the French Monument Commission reported that there was so much to see of the facade that one could actually see the lintel of the door . It was excavated, and in 1858 the Bishop of Bordeaux reopened the service . In the following decades, the church was fundamentally restored in several stages.

Today Notre-Dame is behind the new Soulac, 500 meters from the coast in a sand ditch. The surrounding hills, shoveled up when the church was exposed, are overgrown with pine trees. However, the associated monastery has completely disappeared.

The almost 50 meter long structure follows the general plan of Benedictine church buildings . The extension of the three -nave long building is completed by three choir chapels, the cross-section of which should correspond to that of the naves. The subsequent alterations in the fight against the sand, however, have resulted in the ceiling of the central nave projecting a full five meters above the entrance to the choir.

The church tower on the northwest side was probably built at a later date. A central tower probably rose above the eastern end of the nave beforehand.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Notre-Dame de la Fin-des-Terres in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French)

Web links

Commons : Notre-Dame-de-la-fin-des-Terres  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 45 ° 30 '50 "  N , 1 ° 7' 18.1"  W.