Rocamadour
"I've seen a lot of dramatic settings in France, and I still stopped the car when Rocamadour came into view."
A pilgrimage village stacked vertically into a cliff face above a gorge, its sanctuary chapels built into the rock itself, still visited by pilgrims climbing the same stone steps on their knees that they have for eight centuries.
Technically Rocamadour sits just over the border in the Lot rather than the Dordogne proper, but it’s close enough, and dramatic enough, that skipping it from a Périgord trip would have been a genuine mistake — Lia and I made the forty-minute detour from Sarlat and neither of us regretted a single kilometre of it. The village is built in layers straight up a cliff face above the Alzou gorge: houses and shops at the base, the sanctuary complex halfway up embedded directly into the rock, and a château at the very top, the whole thing looking, from the viewpoint across the valley, less like architecture than geology.
A staircase pilgrims still climb on their knees
Rocamadour has been a major Christian pilgrimage site since at least the twelfth century, built around the discovery of what was believed to be an intact, uncorrupted body identified as Saint Amadour, along with a small dark wooden statue of the Black Madonna still venerated in the Chapelle Notre-Dame today. Pilgrims including several French kings, and reportedly Henry II of England doing penance for his role in Thomas Becket’s murder, climbed the Grand Escalier — a steep staircase of over two hundred steps — some of them on their knees, a tradition that a small number of pilgrims still observe.
We climbed it the ordinary way, which was strenuous enough, and reached the sanctuary terrace where seven chapels are clustered against the cliff face, including the Chapelle Miraculeuse housing the Black Madonna. A rusted medieval sword is set into the rock above one doorway, said by legend to be Durandal, Roland’s sword from the Chanson de Roland, supposedly thrown here by an angel — a claim nobody expects you to believe but that everybody repeats anyway.
The gorge, the château, and a very specific cheese
From the château terrace at the very top, reached by a further path or a small lift for those who’d had enough stairs, the view down the Alzou gorge is dizzying — a wooded ravine dropping away sharply below the entire stacked village. We ate lunch at a small café along the village’s single main street, sharing a plate built around Rocamadour AOP, a small round disc of goat cheese produced in the surrounding plateau country since at least the fifteenth century and protected by its own appellation, sharp and slightly nutty, better than any goat cheese we’d had elsewhere on the trip.
Walking back down at dusk, the sanctuary and château lit up against the darkening cliff, the whole village looked like something from a medieval manuscript rather than a place people had actually built.
When to go: Early morning, before the day-trip coach groups from Sarlat and beyond arrive — Rocamadour gets seriously crowded by midday in summer. Spring and autumn are quieter and cooler for the climb.