Brioude

I’ll admit Brioude wasn’t on my list until a friend in Clermont-Ferrand insisted we make the detour, saying something like “you haven’t seen Romanesque Auvergne until you’ve seen the basilica.” I assumed some exaggeration was involved. It wasn’t. The Basilica of Saint-Julien, the largest Romanesque church in the entire Auvergne region, sits at the center of a town of barely seven thousand people, utterly disproportionate to its surroundings in the best possible way, and I spent a long time just standing in the square in front of it trying to reconcile the scale of the building with the modest streets around it.

A basilica too big for its town

Saint-Julien was built mostly in the twelfth century over the tomb of a Roman soldier martyred for his faith, and what makes it visually distinct from the other great Auvergnat Romanesque churches — Orcival, Issoire, Saint-Nectaire — is the polychrome stonework: bands of dark volcanic basalt alternating with pale arkose sandstone across the facade and the apse, giving the whole exterior a striped, almost decorative quality you don’t get elsewhere in the region. Inside, the nave is vast and cool and dim, with medieval frescoes surviving in patches on the walls and a painted Christ on the cross that locals will tell you, not entirely provably, dates to the plague years. We lit candles and sat in a side chapel for a while, the kind of quiet that only old stone buildings seem to produce.

The Allier gorge below town

Brioude sits right above the Allier river, and the gorge it has cut through the volcanic plateau over millions of years is one of the least visited stretches of dramatic landscape I found anywhere in Auvergne. We followed a footpath down from the old town walls to the riverbank, where the water ran clear and fast over pale stones, hemmed in by steep wooded slopes on both sides. A few fishermen were working the pools for trout, and one of them told us the Allier here is still one of the last major French rivers with a wild Atlantic salmon run, though the numbers have dropped hard in his lifetime. It felt like a small, slightly melancholy postscript to an otherwise very pretty walk.

When to go: Spring and early summer, when the Allier is running full and the meadows around the gorge are green; the basilica itself is a year-round draw regardless of season.