Montpeyroux

Montpeyroux, that is "stony mount", is not built of lava stone but of local arkose stone, which gives it a surprising coppery luminosity. It is to these same arkose quarries that we owe one of the masterpieces of Romanesque art in Auvergne: the twelfth-century church of Saint-Austremoine at Issoire. For centuries, Montpeyroux belonged to the powerful Auvergne family of La Tour from which descended Queen Catherine de' Medici, mother of three kings of France. Of the oval enclosure of the old fortifications, mainly a fine fourteenth-century gate remains. Older, the high Romanesque keep overlooks the village houses by more than thirty metres, its imposing mass bearing witness to what military architecture was in Auvergne at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

← Other sites in Puy-de-Dôme