Avignon travel guide

Top 10 sights in Avignon

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   1© W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Palais des Papes

   The largest Gothic palace in Europe, built between 1335 and 1364 when seven popes ruled the church from Avignon rather than Rome. Twenty-five rooms are open, including Clement VI's study painted with hunting and fishing scenes rather than saints.

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2. 

   2© Rolf Süssbrich · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Avignon Cathedral

   A Romanesque cathedral of the twelfth century beside the papal palace, whose tower carries a gilded lead Virgin six metres high, added in 1859. Two popes are buried inside, and the terrace behind it gives the standard view of the Rhône and the broken bridge.

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   Glanum

   An ancient city below a gorge in the Alpilles, founded as a Celto-Ligurian oppidum around a sacred spring, Hellenised in the second century BC and then rebuilt as a Roman town. Its forum, baths and Greek-plan houses are all excavated, a kilometre south of Saint-Rémy.

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4. 

   4© EmDee · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole

   A tenth-century priory at Saint-Rémy, later Augustinian, with a Romanesque cloister of about 1100. Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum here in May 1889 and painted about 150 canvases in a year, including The Starry Night; his room is reconstructed.

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   5© Herbert Frank from Wien (Vienna), AT · CC BY 2.0

   Musée du Petit Palais

   A gallery in a fourteenth-century cardinal's palace at the north end of the papal square, opened in 1976. It holds the Campana collection of early Italian painting on loan from the Louvre, along with the Avignon school — one of the strongest displays of pre-Renaissance Italian panels in France.

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6. 

   6© Theval55 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Mausoleum of Glanum

   A Gallo-Roman funerary monument just outside Glanum, raised between about 40 and 20 BC for the grandsons of a local notable, and one of the most completely preserved Roman buildings anywhere. It stands with a triumphal arch beside the road, together called Les Antiques.

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7. 

   7© Aleks · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Frigolet Abbey

   A Premonstratensian abbey in the Montagnette hills near Avignon, founded in the tenth century among pines and thyme — frigolet is Provençal for thyme. The monks still make a herbal liqueur, and Daudet wrote about the place in Lettres de mon moulin.

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   8© RuTemple · CC BY 2.0

   Synagogue d'Avignon

   The synagogue of the old papal Jewry, rebuilt as a domed neoclassical rotunda in 1846 after fire destroyed the medieval building. The community here, protected by the popes when France expelled its Jews, kept its own rite as one of the four holy communities of the Comtat Venaissin.

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   Avignon city wall

   A ring of walls 4.3 kilometres long, built by the popes between 1355 and 1370 after mercenary companies threatened the city. Thirty-nine towers and seven gates survive almost intact, which makes Avignon one of the few French cities still fully walled.

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10. 

    10© Vi..Cult... · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Montfavet

    A district on the eastern side of Avignon, an independent commune until 1897. Its fourteenth-century Gothic church, built by a cardinal of the papal court, and the village lanes around it are what remain of the old settlement.

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1. 

   1© Shoshanah · CC BY 2.0

   Calvet Museum

   Avignon's principal museum, grown from the collection the physician Esprit Calvet left the city in 1810. Since the 1980s the paintings have hung in an 18th-century hotel particulier, while the antiquities occupy the Lapidary Museum in the old Jesuit college chapel.

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2. 

   2© Vi..Cult... · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Fort Saint-André (Villeneuve-lès-Avignon)

   A fourteenth-century royal fortress on a hill at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, built by the kings of France to look across the Rhône at the papal city. From its twin-towered gate the palace of the popes is straight ahead, which was exactly the point.

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3. 

   3© Odejea · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Glanum Dam

   A Roman arch dam of the first century BC in the Vallon de Baume, built to supply water to Glanum and one of the earliest arch dams known. Its Roman masonry was reused when a new dam was built on the same line in 1891.

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   Tower of Philip the Fair

   A tower of 1302 at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon marking the French end of the Saint-Bénézet bridge, where travellers passed from the kingdom of France into papal territory. Its upper storeys were added in 1360; the climb of 176 steps gives the widest view of Avignon.

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5. 

   5© Vi..Cult... · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Abbaye de Saint-Ruf d'Avignon

   The ruins of a house of canons regular founded in the eleventh century outside the Avignon walls, and the mother house of the Order of Saint-Ruf, which spread across southern Europe. A bell tower and fragments of wall stand in a park.

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   6© ell brown · CC BY 2.0

   Musée Angladon

   A small museum opened in 1996 from the collection of the Paris couturier and collector Jacques Doucet, in the house of the painter Jean Angladon. It holds the only Van Gogh in Provence — Railway Wagons, painted at Arles in 1888 — with Degas, Cézanne and Picasso.

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   Musée lapidaire d'Avignon

   A museum of stone antiquities in a seventeenth-century Jesuit chapel, holding the classical, Etruscan, Roman and Gallo-Roman sculpture of the Calvet collection since the 1980s. Sarcophagi and funerary reliefs stand under the baroque vault, which is the appeal of it.

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   Palais des papes of Sorgues

   The first papal residence of the Avignon period, built at Sorgues on the orders of John XXII and finished eighteen years before the palace in Avignon itself. Only fragments of wall survive; excavation has established its plan and size.

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   Palais du Roure

   A 15th-century town house built for the Florentine Baroncelli family, whose descendants kept it into the 20th century. Now a museum of Provencal life and letters, holding the archives of the Felibrige poets, it is a listed historic monument.

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10. 

    10© Marianne Casamance · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Muséum Requien

    The natural history museum of Avignon, built on the collection of the nineteenth-century naturalist Esprit Requien, with Provençal fossils, herbaria and insects. Work by Jean-Henri Fabre, the entomologist from nearby Sérignan, is shown here.

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