Baume-les-Messieurs

You don’t really arrive at Baume-les-Messieurs so much as descend into it. The village sits at the closed end of a reculée, a dead-end canyon carved into the Jura’s limestone plateau, and the road drops steeply through hairpins with the cliffs closing in on both sides before opening onto a small green bowl with the village and its abbey at the centre. Lia, checking the map as we descended, said it looked less like a road than a decision the landscape had made for us.

An abbey with an outsized reputation

The Abbaye de Baume-les-Messieurs was founded in the ninth century and grew powerful enough that its monks — the “messieurs” of the name, a title granted because they were mostly minor nobility rather than ordinary clergy — later went on to found the great abbey of Cluny. What remains today is a cluster of Romanesque and Gothic buildings around a peaceful cloister, including a carved Flemish altarpiece inside the church that’s startlingly ornate for a village this size and this far from anywhere.

Comté in the caves, and a waterfall at the end of the walk

Just outside the village, the Grottes de Baume-les-Messieurs are a network of caves and underground galleries with stalactites and an underground river; more usefully for the region’s economy, similar caves nearby have been used for centuries to age Comté cheese at a constant cool temperature, and a short walk from the village brings you to the source of the Cascades des Tufs, where mineral-rich water spills over a series of tufa terraces into the canyon floor. We stood at the base of the falls for a while, cool spray drifting over from a genuinely startling amount of water for such a small opening in the rock.

When to go: Late spring through early autumn, when the waterfall runs strongest after snowmelt and the caves are open for visits; the steep descent road can be tricky in winter conditions.