Silvacane Abbey

It was founded in or around 1144 as a daughter house of Morimond Abbey and was dissolved in 1443; it ceased to be an ecclesiastical property in the French Revolution.

This wealth however provoked the envy of the Benedictines of Montmajour Abbey near Arles, who attacked Silvacane in 1289 and took the Cistercians hostage (they were later released, after much negotiation).

After the site had passed through a number of private hands the church was bought by the French government in 1846 and declared an historical monument, and restoration work initiated.

The abbey church was constructed between 1175 and 1230 in predominantly Romanesque style with some Gothic elements on the highest part of the terrain.

This is the most ornate of the monastery buildings, built at a time when the order had relaxed some of the more rigorous rules of Bernard of Clairvaux.