Photo : Manfred Heyde / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Carennac
The town of Carennac has a very picturesque charm with its blond-stone houses, its brown and russet tile roofs adorned with turrets or tall chimneys, its delightful wooden balconies, its fine carved windows and its Renaissance ogives. The buildings of Carennac — restored to their beauty by remarkable restoration work carried out by local artists and craftsmen — came to surround a priory founded in the eleventh century. You can hire a small boat in the village to visit the islands, including the tiny Calypso, that dot the river in front of Carennac.
Attached to the village priory are the Château des Doyens and a fine Romanesque church of the eleventh and twelfth centuries whose carved portal and tympanum you can admire, as well as the cloister gallery re-vaulted in the fifteenth century. Very near, on a terrace overlooking the water, the high walls of the castle now house the Maison de la Dordogne, a fine museum devoted to this river that runs alongside so many marvels.
