Brantôme
"Brantôme is called the Venice of the Périgord, and for once I didn't roll my eyes at the comparison."
A river town wrapped almost entirely by a loop of the Dronne, built around a Benedictine abbey with monk-carved cave chambers behind it, quiet enough to feel like the Périgord's best-kept secret.
Brantôme sits inside a near-complete loop of the River Dronne, close enough to being an island that locals call it the Venice of the Périgord, a nickname I normally distrust on principle but that felt earned the moment we crossed the sixteenth-century arched bridge into town. Lia and I came here almost as a palate cleanser after the dramatic cliffside spectacle of Beynac and La Roque-Gageac, and Brantôme’s quieter, flatter, water-wrapped charm turned out to be exactly the change of pace we needed.
An abbey with caves carved by monks
The Abbaye de Brantôme was founded, according to tradition, by Charlemagne in the eighth century, though the buildings standing today date mostly from the eleventh through eighteenth centuries, with a freestanding bell tower considered one of the oldest in France. What makes it unusual is what sits behind it: a network of caves cut directly into the limestone cliff backing the abbey, carved and used by the monks over centuries for storage, water management, and, most strikingly, decorated with relief carvings including a large depiction of the Last Judgment and a Crucifixion scene worked directly into the rock face.
We walked through the caves slowly, the air noticeably cooler and damper than outside, tracing water channels the monks had carved to manage runoff from the cliff above, before stepping back out into the abbey gardens where the Dronne runs close enough to the buildings that the whole complex doubles in the water on a still day.
A slow paddle around the loop
The best way to understand Brantôme’s geography is from the water, so we rented a canoe from a stand near the bridge and paddled the loop of the Dronne around the town, passing beneath willows trailing into the current and under the elbow bridge, a distinctive angled stone bridge unique to the town, before coming back around past the abbey from the water side, the bell tower rising directly above us.
We finished the afternoon at a café terrace right on the riverbank, sharing a plate of walnut cake, a Périgord specialty we’d been offered in some version at nearly every stop on this trip, and watching a family of ducks work the same stretch of current we’d just paddled through.
When to go: Late spring through early autumn for canoeing on the Dronne, and a weekday if possible — Brantôme is popular enough in high summer that the narrow bridge and riverside paths get genuinely congested.