Smart Limoges Pass
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What were these countless underground passages dug over the centuries under the city for? Descend to meet a rich past that mixes history, legends and geology.
Visit the basements of Limoges!
The undergrounds of the rule
As you stroll through the sunny medieval streets of Limoges take the time to think about the heritage sleeping under your feet. If the half-timbered houses rise around you, deep cellars extend under the cobblestones. If most of these cavities are private, the Tourist Office and the City of Art and History department invite you to discover the underground passages of the abbey of the Rule, an essential power in the city district equipped with cellars dug in the tuff, vaulted thanks to the know-how of medieval builders. Cavities to store, sanitize the city, protect… so many functions to discover during a guided tour in the bowels of the city.
The Saint-Martial crypt, a discreet vestige of a flourishing abbey
A space now dedicated to major events, the Republic Square also remains the location of the powerful Saint-Martial abbey, a renowned artistic cultural center throughout medieval Christianity. for its songs and the delicacy of its enamels. Place of an important pilgrimage, its crypt sheltered the relics of Saint-Martial, evangelizer, miracle workers of late antiquity. Walking through the underground ruins of the abbey, you will discover, among the sarcophagi of the necropolis, the tomb of this historical figure of the city as well as the life of the monks dividing their days between prayer and work.
Built in the IX° on the tomb of the holy evangelizer, she was destroyed under Napoleon Ier and completely disappeared from the local landscape to be rediscovered during excavations carried out in 1962 during the construction of an underground car park.
