A spiritual vibe, with lentils on the side

Le Puy-en-Velay, Haute Loire

I nearly had to pinch myself — was this city even real?

My 2-day stay in Le Puy-en-Velay, Haute Loire, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, confirmed my mission: to bring you unfiltered, realistic profiles of France’s small to mid-sized towns.

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Lentils and Le Puy

Before my most recent trip, I only knew three things about Le Puy-en-Velay, home to just under 19,000 Ponots and Ponotes.¹

1. Green lentils — les lentilles vertes du Puy

2. Starting point for a stage of the Camino de Santiago² on the GR65: Le Puy-en-Velay to…uh…hmmm…?

3. Located in the Haute Loire department

If I were a food writer, I’d be all over the first point, as these officially labelled legumes are omnipresent in the city’s restaurants. The “queen of lentils” is even bethroned on a roundabout:

But to be honest, I quickly tired of lentils during my stay, perhaps due to an unfortunate encounter with clearly industrial lentil and trout lasagna. (It had sounded like a good idea at the time.)

And I was much more entranced by the city’s deep religious heritage.

Let’s take it from the top — literally.

Notre Dame de France

The looming presence of this semi-kitschy yet undeniably impressive statue of Mary holding an immense and unusually communicative baby Jesus is not easily forgotten.

Built on the volcanic Rocher Corneille, construction of this monument started in 1856 and was completed in 1860. Supported by Napoleon III and financed by a national crowdfunding effort, Notre Dame was fashioned out of 213 canons taken from the Russians during the Crimean war; these two got away.

Over 120,000 people attended her inauguration, and until the creation of the Statue of Liberty in 1886, she was the biggest figurative statue in the “Western” world, and likely anywhere.

22.7 meters (74.47 feet) high, her hair alone measures 7 meters (nearly 23 feet) — and was one of my favorite features.

Plus, if you’re down for some serious stairs, you can climb on up, and get a glimpse of her inner workings.

Somebody had the wherewithal to install tiny windows, providing intriguing mini-viewpoints and aiding visitors suffering from claustrophobia, albeit not acrophobia.

Once you get to the top, you can head right on into Our Lady’s head via this extremely ill-advised and entirely unsupervised ladder.

I was truly alone on my ascent into the statue, so I took a pass on the ladder and regretted it later.

The monument occupies a large, attractive esplanade, giving ample opportunity for viewing Notre Dame from all angles, as well as the cathedral, town, and countryside below.

The statue can be reached on foot only, and visitors are promised that it is “easily accessible in 5 minutes”³. I felt pretty proud of myself as I pranced up, but took note that many would only vouch for the “accessible” part of that claim.

La Cathédrale Notre Dame du Puy

Set a bit below Notre Dame the statue, Le Puy’s cathedral astonishes by its improbable position high above the town center.

Its first spans were built on a combination of volcanic rock and a terraced area dating back to antiquity.

Le Puy became a major pilgrimage site devoted to the Virgin Mary as early as the 4th century. By the 12th, as a result of medieval over-tourism, the cathedral was overwhelmed by pilgrims. An expansion was in order, but how?

It was decided to extend the cathedral into the void by building the third and fourth spans onto pillars that would make up an immense portal.

It’s brain-breaking to imagine, but the part of the cathedral interior that you see in the photo above reposes on what you see below:

I can’t fathom how this feat could be accomplished in any century, much less the 12th.

In the early evening, the place exuded a warm and open atmosphere, filled with a pleasant buzz of chatting going on among pure tourists, nuns in habit, and pilgrims heading out the next morning to roast on the Camino de Santiago.

Before descending back into the real world, I spent some time sneakily discreetly observing this pair, whom I had taken for a couple.

It turns out they were solo senior hikers, sharing their plans for their own 21st century pilgrimage that would start the next day.

Le Puy-en-Velay is a rich, wondrous town, and of course there is more to come.

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1. Inhabitants may also be called Aniciens et Aniciennes, but this would appear to be less frequently used

2. If you want to know more: Camino de Santiago - Wikipedia

3. Documents clearly specify that it is not accessible for visitors with reduced mobility.