Saorge

Saorge is a perched village of the upper Roya valley, in the Alpes-Maritimes, overlooking the river gorges. Its four- or five-storey houses cling to the slopes, packed against each other, and you move around only on foot, in a maze of steep lanes, often vaulted and stepped. It is ranked among the Most Beautiful Villages of France.

Mentioned from the tenth century, Saorge belonged to the counts of Ventimiglia, to Provence, then to the dukes of Savoy from 1388, and remained in the County of Nice until its attachment to France in 1860. The Franciscan convent, founded in 1633 and listed as a historic monument, houses a Baroque church and a painted cloister. The church of Saint-Sauveur, rebuilt in the late fifteenth century, keeps an organ of 1847, while the Romanesque chapel of Sainte-Marie del Poggio dates from the eleventh century.

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