Moissac Abbey

The cloister at Moissac was completed in 1100 and survives whole: seventy-six capitals carved with biblical scenes, saints' lives, animals and foliage, on alternating single and paired columns around a garden, the earliest large narrative cloister of its kind to come down to us. The south porch, added around 1130, carries a tympanum of Christ in Majesty surrounded by the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse, each turning to look up, with a trumeau of crossed lions below; it is one of the works that defined the Romanesque style. The abbey sits on the Compostela pilgrimage route and is UNESCO listed for that.

What you actually see

• The cloister - seventy-six carved capitals complete around a garden.
• The south tympanum - Christ and the twenty-four elders in stone.
• The lion trumeau - crossed beasts on the central doorpost.
• The pilgrimage setting - a stage on the road to Compostela.

When to go

April to October; the cloister opens year-round with shorter winter hours. Morning light suits the capitals. It is quiet compared with the better-known Romanesque sites.

Honest expectations

The abbey church interior is later Gothic and less remarkable than the cloister and porch. A railway was driven close to the buildings in the nineteenth century and nearly destroyed the cloister. The town is small.

Nearby

Montauban lies southeast; the Canal de Garonne passes the town.