Vendôme

Vendôme confuses people before they’ve even arrived, and it confused me too the first time a French friend mentioned it — it sits not on the Loire but on the Loir, a smaller, gentler tributary with almost the same name and none of the same fame, one letter different and an entirely separate river. It’s also the town where the high-speed TGV line from Paris to Bordeaux touches the valley, meaning tens of thousands of travellers pass within sight of it every week on their way to somewhere else, almost none of them stopping. We did, on the strength of a single photo of the abbey bell tower, and I’m glad we did.

An abbey that outgrew its own church

The Abbaye de la Trinité de Vendôme was founded in the eleventh century and grew into one of the most influential monastic centres in the region, largely on the strength of a relic it claimed to hold — a tear of Christ, supposedly wept over Lazarus and gifted to the abbey by Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou, in 1040. Whatever you make of the relic’s authenticity, it turned Vendôme into a genuine pilgrimage stop for centuries, and the abbey’s church reflects that ambition: a freestanding Gothic bell tower, over eighty metres tall and entirely detached from the main church body, an architectural choice that’s rare enough in France to make specialists travel here specifically to study it. Inside, the choir stalls are carved with an odd, playful catalogue of scenes — animals, folk figures, even a few faces that look suspiciously like caricature — a reminder that medieval religious art wasn’t always solemn.

A river town built for slow afternoons

The Loir splits into several channels as it passes through town, crossed by small stone bridges and lined with washhouses that were still in use within living memory, and walking along the water in the late afternoon, watching ducks navigate the mill races, gave the whole visit an unhurried quality that felt very different from the more curated château stops earlier in the trip. There’s a ruined castle on the hill above town too, mostly overgrown terraces and a broken keep, that gives a good vantage over the rooftops and the abbey tower without charging admission or organizing a single tour group.

We ended up staying the night specifically because we’d arrived planning on an hour, which by that point in the trip had become something of a pattern with the towns nobody had told us to prioritize.

When to go: Anytime you’re catching the TGV through this stretch of France — build in an extra half day rather than treating it as a pass-through, the abbey alone justifies it.