France Guide
Poitou-Charentes and the Atlantic coast
The church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande
The Palais de Justice looks down on one of the greatest and most idiosyncratic churches in France, Notre-Dame-la-Grande, begun in the twelfth-century reign of Eleanor and renovated most recently in the mid-1990s – the lower parts of the facade had suffered considerable erosion due to salt from the market stalls of fishmongers seeping up into the stone over centuries.
The most exceptional thing about the church is the west front, which is wonderfully transformed in a display of coloured lights at 10.30pm every evening in summer. You can't call the facade beautiful, at least not in a conventional sense, squat and loaded as it is with detail to a degree that the modern eye could regard as fussy. And yet it's this detail which is enthralling, ranging from the domestic to the disturbingly anarchic. Such elaborate sculpted facades – and domes like pine cones on turret and belfry – are the hallmarks of the Poitou brand of Romanesque. The interior, which is crudely overlaid with nineteenth-century frescoes, is not nearly as interesting.