Monastery of Our Lady of Prouille

In the early 13th century, Prouille was a decayed village, a fortified enclosure with a few buildings surrounding a crumbling church attached to the parish of Fanjeaux.

Diego de Acebo, Bishop of Osma, and his canon, Dominic Gúzman, established themselves at Prouille, deep in Cathar country, in late 1206.

On 17 April 1207 — the first certain date in the history of Notre-Dame-de-Prouille — Bérenger, the Bishop of Narbonne gave the new establishment the revenues of the Church of Saint-Martin at Limoux, though this gift was destined to be disputed by the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire.

Other men lived there too, because the second purpose of Prouille was to serve as a base for the itinerant preachers who conducted the work of conversion of the Cathars begun by Diego and Dominic.

[3] Its triumphal rebuilding was a personal project of Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, who was the catalyst of the return of the banned Dominicans to France under the French Second Empire;[4] Histories of the Holy Rosary often attribute its origin to Saint Dominic, inspired by a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Prouille.