The descent from Gordes runs some three kilometres down a road cut into the hillside, and at the bottom, in a valley barely three hundred metres wide, the abbey lies with the slope at its back. The stream that opened the valley is the Sénancole, and the name has long been read as sana aqua, healthy water. The roofs are lauzes, flat limestone slabs laid straight onto the vaults; the bell-tower above them is squat, built low against the mistral that funnels down this corridor. On the level ground before the west range grow ten hectares of lavandin.
The church behind that range faces the wrong way. Cistercian custom put the altar at the east end, toward the rising sun; here the valley left no room for it, so the apse points north and the compass gave way to the ground. What these monks brought into Provence was the conviction that a house of prayer needs nothing beyond proportion and cut stone — no portal on the west front, no carved figures, capitals worked down to a single leaf so that nothing in the cloister would catch the eye and hold it.
Monks from Mazan in the Ardèche came down into the valley in 1148, and a community lives here yet: six of them, seven offices a day, the first long before dawn, meals taken in silence. The enclosure stays shut while the visit passes through the church and the cloister, and the shop by the gate sells the honey and the lavender essence that keep the roofs on. The abbey is a favourite of photographers. Under the photograph is a working monastery.
📜 History & Spiritual Significance
Alfant, bishop of Cavaillon, brought the Cistercians into this valley in 1148: about a dozen men under an abbot named Pierre, sent from the abbey of Mazan, the fourth Cistercian house planted in Provence after Le Thoronet, Aiguebelle and Silvacane. Two years later the lord of the land, Guiran de Simiane, gave the valley outright, and the priory became an abbey. Within four years it was strong enough to send its own colony north into the diocese of Viviers.
Wealth came, as it came to most Cistercian houses, from work the rule intended to keep them poor: mills on the streams, granges across the Comtat, forty monks in choir at the height of it, and estates given by the lords of Simiane and of Venasque. Geoffroy de Venasque, the greatest of those benefactors, lies in the eastern arm of the transept under three arched recesses cut with his arms. Then discipline slackened, commendatory abbots were appointed from outside, and the community shrank to a dozen.
In 1544 the wars against the Waldensians of the Luberon reached the valley. Monks were hanged and the monastery burned; the range where the lay brothers lived was destroyed and lay in ruins for a century and a half. Eight hundred men under Maran, an apostate priest of Ménerbes, did the work. By the end of the seventeenth century two religious were left in the whole house. The Revolution suppressed what remained and sold the valley as national property. The buyer, oddly for that moment, kept the buildings standing and consolidated them — after stripping the church of its ornament and having the coats of arms hammered off the stone.
In 1854 Cistercians of the Immaculate Conception under Dom Barnouin took quarters in the empty abbey; three years later the owner made over the property to them. Seventy-two monks settled here, and new ranges went up beside the medieval ones. The state emptied the house twice: gendarmes cleared it under the anti-congregation decrees, and in 1903 the congregations were expelled outright, after which the community crossed to Lérins, the island abbey off Cannes. The monks came back after the First World War, as a priory of Lérins, and withdrew a second time in 1969, when the last five went to the island.
The buildings did not fall empty. The Berliet family, whose lorry works had taken a thirty-year lease and paid half the cost of the repairs, opened the abbey as a meeting place for writers and thinkers, on the condition written into the lease that its religious character be kept and that monks return before the term ran out. They returned in 1988, when Pierre Berliet let a small community come back from Lérins ahead of time.
In 1974, when a chapel that had braced the east aisle was pulled down, the nave began to move. The aisle was subsiding, the twelfth-century vault threatened to come down, and the church was shut in a hurry. The repair was paid for by public subscription, and the flank of the church now carries five heavy buttresses faced in stone cut to match the old. Six monks keep the house, a priory of Lérins under the archdiocese of Avignon. They live from the visit, the bookshop, the lavandin, an olive grove and their bees, and the shop sells what more than fifty other monasteries make.
☩ Pilgrimage Sites at Sénanque
Sénanque Abbey
Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque
One address, one enclosure, one visit. The church, the cloister, the chapter house, the calefactory and the old dormitory are shown; the rest belongs to the monks. The church is a tau cross in plan, its apse standing clear of the outer wall, and the crossing carries a dome on squinches — quarter-spheres rather than the usual cones, a solution found in one other church in France. The west front has no central door, only two side doors: one by which the lay brothers came in from their range, one for guests and for carrying the dead out to the cemetery. Above them, two narrow windows and an oculus of twelve lobes, the same figure the masons had cut at Mazan, the mother house.
In the cloister, four bays to a gallery, triple round arches rest on twin columns with water-leaf capitals; at the south-west corner are the traces of the lavabo where the monks washed before meals. In the north gallery a carved mask takes the spring of an arch — the only human face in the whole abbey. The masons' own marks are another matter: they are counted in thousands on these walls. The chapter house is vaulted on two squat pillars, their capitals carved with flat leaves and volutes. The calefactory next to it was the one heated room, and therefore the room where books were copied; its old fireplace remains, and it is lit one night a year.
The interior is visited by guided tour in French at fixed times, with places limited and booking needed; for anyone without French the abbey recommends going round unguided with its tablet guide, which speaks eleven languages. The grounds and the car park are free. Silence and modest dress are asked for, photography is allowed but not professional equipment, and nothing may be recorded during Mass or the offices. Mass and the Divine Office are open to whoever comes; the times, and the times of the visit, are on the abbey's own site.
The lavender
The monks planted lavandin on the terraces below the west range and farm it with growers from the valley; the harvest goes to the essence sold in the shop. The bloom is at its fullest in the last days of June and the first of July, and by the final week of July the colour has gone muted. The small field at the entrance has been replanted with young stock; the wide field in front of the apse is the one the photographs are taken from.
🕯️ Annual Feast Days & Celebrations
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux — 20 August
The community keeps the feast of the abbot whose reform sent the first monks down this valley, and the prior preaches on him as our Saint Bernard: founder of Clairvaux, Doctor of the Church, and the reason a Cistercian house looks the way this one looks.
The Easter Vigil
The new fire is struck in the twelfth-century calefactory — the one night in the year the old fireplace is lit — and the paschal candle is carried from there into the church. The abbey publishes its Triduum programme on its own site; places are limited.
The daily round
Seven offices a day, beginning long before first light, with Mass among them, and rest that never exceeds seven hours. Meals are eaten in silence. Visitors are welcome at the offices, and the abbey posts the hours on its own site, which is the only place they are reliably current.
🛏️ Where to Stay
Abbaye de Sénanque Hôtellerie (pilgrim accommodation) — The monks keep a guest house for those who come to share the life of prayer, silence and recollection; meals are taken in silence with the community. A stay is possible only within a religious retreat, and the abbey also runs introductory weekends in lectio divina with limited places. The Brother Hotelier arranges both, by e-mail to frere.hotelier@ndsenanque.org. Website
La Ferme de la Huppe ⭐⭐⭐⭐ — Ten rooms in an eighteenth-century Provençal farmhouse on the plain below Gordes, with a garden, a pool and a restaurant of its own; dogs are taken for a supplement. Website ∙ Reserve this hotel
More hotels in Sénanque Abbey on Booking.com →
Accommodation available to book near Sénanque Abbey. Pilgrim houses and religious guesthouses are listed above — many take bookings directly and do not appear on booking sites.
🚗 Getting There
By Car: From Coustellet take the D900 to Gordes, then the D177 toward Venasque, nine kilometres in all; the last stretch, the D177A, drops to the abbey door. From the A7 the exits are Avignon Sud (24) coming from Lyon and Cavaillon coming from Marseille. Between 15 March and 30 September the descent is one-way for cars: down by the D177 and back by the Col des Trois Termes and the D244 into Gordes. For coaches, campers and lorries it is one-way all year round. Parking at the abbey is free, and there is a coach park. Aix-en-Provence is about an hour away, and the abbey makes an easy day out from Avignon.
By Train: The nearest station is Cavaillon, about twenty kilometres off, with regional trains to and from Avignon; the bus below connects the station with Gordes. The same bus route offers a connection at Coustellet toward Avignon TGV.
By Bus: ZOU! line 917, the old line 17, runs between Cavaillon and Apt by way of Gordes, calling at the Cavaillon station interchange and, in Gordes, at Place du Château and Les Bories. Cavaillon to Gordes takes about twenty-seven minutes. Services run several times a day in July and August and thin to one or two on weekdays out of season. The bus does not go down to the abbey.
On Foot: About an hour down from Gordes to the abbey by the road, and a stiffer hour back up.
🔗 Useful Links
Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque — The monks' own site: the visit, the guest house, retreats and the abbey's news.
Masses and Offices — The current timetable of Mass and the Divine Office, and the conditions asked of visitors who attend.
Abbey Shop — Honey, lavender essence and olive oil from the valley, alongside the produce of more than fifty other monasteries.
Fondation du Patrimoine — Sénanque — The public appeal that paid for the rescue of the church, with the account of what was wrong with it.
🧭 Nearby Pilgrimage Destinations
Apt (18 km) — The cathedral that claims the body of St Anne, with two Romanesque crypts beneath it and the veil that carries her name.
Avignon (30 km) — The Gothic palace from which seven popes ruled the Western Church, beside the cathedral of Notre-Dame des Doms.
Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume (76 km) — The Gothic basilica holding the relics of St Mary Magdalene in its crypt.
Cotignac (90 km) — The one village where all three members of the Holy Family are held to have appeared.
Île Saint-Honorat (157 km) — Lérins, the mother house: the island the community fled to when it was expelled, and the house the present monks came from.
Gordes (3 km) — The village on the ridge above the valley, one of the plus beaux villages de France, with the dry-stone huts of the Village des Bories on the slope below it.
Silvacane and Le Thoronet — The other two Cistercian abbeys of Provence, built in the same generation and the same austerity; the three are known together as the Provençal sisters.
🪶 Closing Reflection
"Sénanque, long forgotten in its solitude, preserved by a miracle, is a relic of the Middle Ages."
