The Haute-Loire department has attractive landscapes and is popular with tourists – in particular families camping and people interested in outdoor sports. The tourism tradition traces back over 1,000 years – Brioude and Le Puy-en-Velay (which we haven’t visited yet) have historic cathedrals at which pilgrims gather before starting their journey to Santiago de Compostela. We explored Auzon and Brioude on our trip to Puy-de-Dôme in 2025.
Auzon
Auzon is a fortified medieval village located on a rocky spur for strategic and defensive reasons. It’s not particularly populated, with a sleepy air, though there’s signs of renovation coming into the area. It’s especially pretty, easy to access (11 km from Brioude), and worth a stop to see the church and walk the walls.
**Saint-Laurent Church: A 12th-century former Benedictine collegiate church flanked by an imposing porch with sculpted capital. It’s small and dark, on the more austere side, though there are some important artifacts inside: a stone statue of Our Lady of the Portal from the late 15th century and a Romanesque Christ figure reliquary in polychrome wood from the late 12th century.
The Château d’Auzon is a bit hard to see from the town directly, but from the overlook you get a good view of the impressive, and restored, structure. Like many former military defense castles, the castle was the subject of many phases of destruction & redevelopment over the centuries. The result is a complex site, witnessing the entanglement of architectural styles corresponding to the different construction or development campaigns.
One of my favorite anecdotes about the town is the story of the Franks Casket – a small Anglo-Saxon whale’s bone chest from the early 8th century. It belonged to the church of Saint-Julien in Brioude; it was then in the “possession” of a family in Auzon (perhaps looted during the french revolution). It served as a sewing box until the silver hinges and fittings joining the panels were traded for a silver ring. The bone parts were shown to a Professor Mathieu from nearby Clermont-Ferrand, who sold them to an antique shop in Paris, where they were bought in 1857 by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, who subsequently donated the panels in 1867 to the British Museum. The missing right end panel was later found in a drawer by the family in Auzon and sold to the Bargello Museum, Florence, where it was identified as part of the casket in 1890. The British Museum display includes a cast of it.
Brioude
We found Brioude to be rather charming and cute – perhaps not an overnight stay, but a worthy stop for the extremely impressive Romanesque church, ***Basilica of St. Julien, the largest Christian church in Auvergne. Built in the 11th-14th centuries, it has notable colorful frescoes, and is my favorite of the churches of the region. It became a major place of pilgrimage and a stop on the routes to Santiago de Compostela, Rome, and Jerusalem.
The building stone is remarkably ornate and exuberant, using pink and blond sandstones, volcanic rock, limestone and marble. Look out for:
- The modern stained glass windows painted by Kim En Joong
- The mosaic floor of river stones
- The massive amount of frescoes
- The charming carvings everywhere
There’s a small chapel to the right of the entrance that’s easy to miss (serving as the gift shop) – they found a major mural of the last judgement behind wood panels in the 1950s that’s gruesomely interesting.
