Mont St. Michel

As a friend, you know we travel a lot. We like to go places, and we like the places we go, and we enjoy the experiences of new lands, new foods, new adventures. But many places, while being nice to visit, just fail to live up to the hype. Which makes others stand out even more.

Mont St. Michel is in the latter category. There’ll be no Mont St. Michel replica in Vegas. It just wouldn’t work. The real thing is so amazing on so many levels: visually, historically, religiously, environmentally, that it simply stands alone.

Literally:

Bishop Aubert directed monks to start building the first abbey and church here in the 10th century. They kept building it higher and grander, first by expanding the footprint of the original site, then adding in domed and reinforced rooms to act as support for another level of larger church on top of the existing one. After many modifications and three levels, they ended up with the site as we see it today.

It sits atop a rocky island at the mouth of the Coueson river, which divides the Normandy peninsula from its Brittany counterpart. It became a national symbol of France when it withstood attacks for thirty years during the Anglo-French Hundred Years War. During the Middle Ages, it was an important center for learning and manuscript writing, but later its influence waned. During the French Revolution, it was seized (as was all Catholic church property), ransacked, and gutted. The Revolutionary government turned it into a prison for priests, a function for which it was to continue for seventy years of neglect.

During a French cultural renaissance in the late 19th century, the government began the long and difficult process of restoring the abbey. They built a causeway and tramway to the island to enable tourism, and started repairing the buildings. In 1969, Benedictine monks returned, and in 2001, sisters and brothers of the Monastic Communities of Jerusalem took over.

The aforementioned causeway had several negative effects. It greatly increased tourism, leading to a rash of tawdry shops and cafes along the single main street. The causeway changed the silting deposits of the river, threatening to turn the island into a part of the mainland. The French government spent millions determining a solution, which involved a new dam/sluice gate and a new casueway, which leave the island with its unique blend of massive sandy tidal flats at low tide.

I whined a bit about things that went wrong when we visited Chartres; here everything went right, with a nod to the French government for its well-designed and executed plan for the abbey. We bought tickets online (timed) and arrived in the parking lots (huge) on schedule. The free trolleys kept on schedule and got us to the base of the island quickly, if crowded. We managed the less traveled back road up to the abbey and got seats in the main chapel for Sunday mass. Lucky us, for a group of French Catholic Scouts had arrived, with two Bishops in tow (nary a rook or knight in sight)! Afterwards, we completed our “timed” visit to the abbey at our leisure, just before the holiday crowds jam-packed the main street.

It was an unexpected, albeit wonderful time. One caution: There is no French-with-disabilities act. The abbey was built as an agglomeration of several styles and editions, so there are literally about five hundred stairs (both up and down) within the abbey itself, after doing another five hundred or so to get to the abbey. And these are ancient stairs, with odd sizes and shapes, sometimes with added hand rails but more often none. It’s a challenge to the young and healthy, so you need to plan extra time; there is no hurrying along at the Mont!