St Blasien Cathedral

A Benedictine abbey stood here from the ninth century, and after a fire in 1768 the abbot commissioned a rebuilding from the French architect Pierre Michel d'Ixnard in the new neoclassical manner; the result, consecrated in 1783, is a rotunda with a dome about thirty-six metres in diameter and sixty-two high, at the time the third largest dome in Europe after St Peter's and the Pantheon, in a village of a few thousand people in a narrow forest valley. The monastery was dissolved in 1806 and the buildings later became a Jesuit boarding school, which still occupies them. The interior is white and largely unornamented.

What you actually see

• The dome - thirty-six metres across in a small forest village.
• The white interior - a plain neoclassical rotunda with a ring of columns.
• The scale contrast - a monumental church in a narrow valley.
• The former abbey - conventual buildings now a boarding school.

When to go

Year-round; the church is open daily and closes during services. The valley is snowbound in winter but the road stays open. Concerts use the acoustics in summer.

Honest expectations

The interior is deliberately plain and can feel cold. The village has little else. The monastery buildings are a working school and closed.

Nearby

The Feldberg rises north; the Swiss border is south.