The Loire Valley is renowned for its spectacular fairy-tale châteaux and their associated tales of chivalry. The Château de Saumur exemplifies this: its medieval glory is captured in the fifteenth-century masterpiece Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Although seen in an idealized version in that luxuriant manuscript, Saumur in person is very much the storybook castle, and it is heavily trafficked by tourists as such. But only a twenty-minute drive away in the Loire countryside lies one of France’s most important religious and historical places, Fontevraud-l’Abbaye, albeit one that figures less in the guidebooks. Here spirituality and monarchy converged in the pre-revolutionary age to create a remarkable complex, one of the largest surviving monastic settlements from the medieval period, but also a site that has been modernized in a most unexpected and rewarding way.

Tourists, mainly French on their August holidays, trickled in at opening. Before long, the small village around the abbey and the boulangerie opposite the abbey’s gates were busy with the arrival of further visitors, the later sightseers reflecting the broader international interest of the place. First and foremost, the abbey—the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, to give it its full title—was a royal tomb. Herein lies its greatest fame. Buried here between 1189 and 1204 are those towering figures of the Middle Ages: King Henry II, King Richard the Lionheart, and—respectively their wife and mother—Eleanor of Aquitaine. Alongside their surviving stone tombs is a more diminutive one made of wood,