Attractions and Places To See around Gémozac - Top 20

Magnificent port

You can also spend a night at the Saint James House B&B, quality guest rooms, swimming pool and view of the Donjon 🙂

The keep of Pons is located in the commune of Pons in the French department of Charente-Maritime in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. This tower is the old keep of the castle of Pons. 33 m high, it is visible from a long distance and is the symbol of the city. With the Saint-Gilles chapel, the remains of the ramparts and the main building, it constitutes the remains of the ancient castle of Pons.

The Saint-Pierre-ès-Liens church: From the novel to the novel, there is only one step here and not only in the text! This church holds a special place in the Saintonge Romanesque landscape because it is built on the remains of a Gallo-Roman villa. The first bay of the choir, which carries the bell tower, reuses part of the walls of this villa and we can still observe fragments of a hypocaust, composed of an octagonal-shaped swimming pool. The church contains the oldest elements still visible in the religious buildings of Saintonge with masonry made of small regular rubble stones. Its classic plan has a two-bay nave and a pointed cradle vaulted transept. The choir bay is covered with a dome called “barlongue sur trompes”. The apse is decorated with an arcade which has beautiful sculpted capitals: a scene of the Holy Women at the Tomb; remains of archaic Romanesque sculpture which reveal lion tamers, a bow and falcon hunting scene. The front choir is a very old part of the building, dating from the 10th or 11th century, where magnificent Carolingian capitals decorated with fine arabesques remain. The church has two facades to the West and the South. Note the very curious series of modillions on the western facade, cubic in design.

nice little hike

Good selection of restaurants, however if like us you want to create your own lunch the supermarket is 10 minutes up hill on your bicycle.

Certain foundations of small elongated freestones bear witness to a building from the end of the 11th century or the beginning of the 12th century. The nave was taken over in the second half of the 12th century and reinforced by arcades. If the base of the bell tower is characteristic of Romanesque architecture, its upper part bears the mark of the first Gothic age. The octagonal stone spire crowns a bell chamber based on a similar plan, the sides featuring alternating single bays and twin bays. Finally, the north wall and the facade were redone in the 19th century, the first bay of the nave having been shortened in order to widen the road passing in front of the church41. Like the majority of churches in the region, the Saint-Pierre de Gémozac church is based on a plan in the shape of a Latin cross. It consists of a single nave with four bays covered with a pointed barrel vault, which was completely redone in the 16th century. Inside, arcades respond to the buttresses and serve to reinforce the structure of the building. As in some Romanesque churches in the region, the transepts are covered with cupolas. However, if the north brace has a dome on squinches, the south brace has the particularity of having a dome on pendentives. The two arms of the transept are extended by apsidioles: the oldest (12th century), that of the south transept, forms a vaulted hemicycle; the most recent is a rectangular chapel covered with ribbed vaults. A narrow arcade opens onto the first bay of the choir. This forms a set of two spans. The first is covered with quadripartite warheads, while the second is completed by liernes. The flat apse (13th century), pierced with a triplet, testifies to the Cistercian influence on the architecture of the time. The church of Saint-Pierre de Gémozac is part of the tourist inventory of the most beautiful churches of Saintonge and is often cited among the religious buildings worthy of a visit. In certain aspects, this church is indeed one of the beautiful Romanesque churches of the Saintonge type, among which are still the remarkable churches of Rétaud, Rioux or even Thaims, all located in its canton.

This church, with few remains from the 12th century, was rebuilt in the 13th and 14th centuries, while the bell tower dates back to the 15th century. The façade was rebuilt around 1850. The nave, divided into five bays, was once covered with a vault and collapsed in 1756, destroying a chapel and a beautiful portal. This single nave features very elegant windows adorned with richly decorated capitals on the north façade. The flat-bottomed apse is pierced by a semicircular triplet whose small columns bear beautiful 12th-century capitals with ribbed palmette motifs. The east face of the bell tower bears traces of the former location of the nave roof, which is approximately 7 meters higher, as evidenced by the height of the northern buttresses. On the outside, on two capitals of the south wall, there is an illustration of the fable of the fox and the stork, an episode that can be found on the reused bas-relief decorating the facade of Saint-Symphorien de Crézac.