Pont Davignon

Avignon and the Pont Saint-Bénézet: History with a Nursery Rhyme Attached

The Pont d’Avignon, properly called the Pont Saint-Bénézet, is the ruined medieval bridge that sticks out into the Rhône and stops about halfway across. Most visitors know it from the French nursery rhyme “Sur le Pont d’Avignon,” which describes people dancing on it. In practice it was never wide enough for the kind of social dancing the song implies; historians suspect the dancing happened under the bridge, on an island that no longer exists. The song is still accurate in the sense that Avignon remains the sort of place that makes people want to celebrate being somewhere beautiful.

The Bridge

Construction started in 1177 and was completed, according to legend, by a shepherd named Bénézet who claimed to be divinely instructed to build it. It originally stretched 900 metres across the Rhône with 22 arches. Floods destroyed most of it in the 17th century and it was never fully repaired. Four arches survive, plus a small Romanesque chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas that sits on one of the piers.

Admission to walk on the bridge is around €5 and includes an audio guide. The views of the Palais des Papes from the bridge’s end are the best you’ll get. The experience takes about 30 minutes. Skip the audio guide and just look at the water.

The bridge is visually best from the Rocher des Doms park above the old city, where you can see the surviving arches and the full width of the Rhône. The park is free, has excellent views, and is full of locals at lunchtime. It’s inexplicably underused by tourists who instead pay for the bridge access and miss the better angle.

The Palais des Papes

This is Avignon’s genuine architectural centrepiece. Between 1309 and 1377, the papacy decamped from Rome to Avignon under French pressure. Seven popes resided here during what became known as the Avignon Papacy, considered by Rome a period of illegitimacy but from the French perspective a time of extraordinary cultural and political investment in the city. The palace built to house them is enormous: the largest Gothic structure in Europe, occupying nearly 15,000 square metres.

The interior is largely bare. Much of the furnishing was removed during the French Revolution when the palace served as a prison and barracks. What remains are the scale of the rooms, fragments of 14th-century frescoes in the Chapelle Saint-Martial and the Chambre du Cerf, and the overwhelming sense of institutional power. The audio guide is genuinely good here; the visual richness that once existed is now mostly imagined, and the guide helps reconstruct it.

Admission is around €12. Combined tickets with the bridge and various other Avignon monuments offer discounts worth taking.

The City Inside the Walls

Avignon’s old city is surrounded by 14th-century ramparts that are almost entirely intact. Walking the circuit (about 5 kilometres) is possible and gives a strong sense of the city’s scale. The main commercial street, the Rue de la République, runs from the train station to the Place de l’Horloge and is predictably busy with tourists. The more interesting streets are parallel to it, particularly around the Rue des Teinturiers, where the old dyers’ workshops faced the small canal that powered their mills.

The Friday morning market at the covered market (Les Halles) on the Place Pie is the best food market in the city. Provençal produce: olives, herbs, soft cheese, charcuterie from the Ardèche, early strawberries in spring, tomatoes and courgettes in summer. Arrive before 11am. The green-curtained wall on the exterior of Les Halles is a vertical herb garden.

Food and Staying

The restaurant scene has improved considerably. Le Violette in the Musée Angladon courtyard serves lunch outdoors in summer and has a short, well-considered menu of regional produce. La Fourchette, on Rue Racine, is a genuine Avignon institution for traditional Provençal cooking at reasonable prices; book ahead.

For staying, La Mirande, immediately behind the Palais des Papes, is Avignon’s finest hotel and occupies a 17th-century cardinal’s palace. It costs accordingly. The Hotel Cloître Saint-Louis, in a converted 16th-century Jesuit novitiate, is more accessible and the cloister courtyard is lovely.

Logistics

TGV trains from Paris Gare de Lyon reach Avignon TGV station in 2 hours 40 minutes. The TGV station is 3 kilometres south of the old city; a free shuttle bus connects to the old city wall. The old city itself has almost no useful parking inside the walls.

Avignon’s famous theatre festival (Festival d’Avignon) runs through most of July. The city fills completely and accommodation requires booking months ahead. Prices rise substantially. The festival is excellent if you like avant-garde performance; it’s disruptive if you don’t.