Souillac

Souillac sits on the Dordogne river at the point where the valley starts to widen out of its gorge-like upper stretches, and it has always functioned as more of a working crossroads than a postcard village — a market town, a rail stop, a place people pass through on the way to Sarlat or Rocamadour. We nearly did the same, until a stop for lunch turned into an afternoon because of one church.

A carved portal that looks like a fever dream

The Église Sainte-Marie de Souillac is what remains of a 12th-century Benedictine abbey, and its west portal, relocated inside the church after later rebuilding, is one of the strangest and most compelling pieces of Romanesque sculpture I’ve seen anywhere in France. The central trumeau shows the Old Testament story of the prophet Isaiah beneath a wildly contorted composition of interlaced animals and human figures illustrating the legend of Theophilus, a cleric who supposedly sold his soul to the devil and was saved by the Virgin Mary — twisting bodies, beasts biting each other’s tails, a level of carved violence and movement that feels almost modern in its energy. Local guides point out that the sculpture was moved and reassembled after the original façade was damaged, which explains why some panels seem oddly stacked, but none of that dulls the impact of standing in front of it.

Gateway to a hole in the ground

Souillac’s other role, less artistic and more practical, is as the easiest access point to the Gouffre de Padirac, a massive natural chasm about twenty minutes northeast, where an underground river is explored partly on foot and partly by boat through cathedral-sized caverns. We based ourselves in Souillac for two nights specifically to do the trip, and it made a relaxed base — a proper riverside town with real bakeries and a Saturday market rather than a tourist village built around one attraction. In the evenings we walked along the Dordogne’s banks near the old mill, where the river is wide and slow here compared to its dramatic loops further downstream at places like Domme.

When to go: Spring through early autumn if you’re combining it with the Gouffre de Padirac, which is far less crowded on weekday mornings; Souillac itself is pleasant nearly year-round given how much less touristed it is than Sarlat, just twenty minutes away.