Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges Cathedral
— the hill that holds five centuries of light.
Not only on a wall.
“A hilltop village in the French Pyrenees, two hundred and forty-three people and a cathedral that would belong to a city ten times its size. Bishop Bertrand started building in 1083 on the ruins of a Roman colony of thirty thousand. Romanesque cloister, Gothic nave, a Renaissance organ inaugurated in 1535 and still played at summer concerts. Sixty-six oak choir stalls carved by Toulouse sculptors over a twenty-eight-year stretch beginning in 1523. Pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostela have been stopping here for nine hundred years. The cloister opens onto the Garonne valley and the road south to Spain.
Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges Cathedral, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges sits on a hill in the Haute-Garonne department of southwestern France, in the Occitanie region, where the Pyrenees foothills meet the Garonne valley. The village has two hundred and forty-three residents and is a member of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. The site was first the Roman colony of Lugdunum Convenarum, which reached roughly thirty thousand inhabitants before its decline. Toulouse is one hundred and ten kilometres to the north; the Spanish border crosses the Pyrenees about forty kilometres to the south. The cathedral occupies the highest ground in the village, visible from the valley road below.
Three building campaigns are stacked into one church. Bishop Bertrand de l'Isle-Jourdain, later canonised as Saint Bertrand, began the Romanesque cathedral in 1083; the cloister and lower nave survive from that work. In the fourteenth century Bertrand de Goth, who would become Pope Clement V, commissioned the Meridional Gothic extension that gives the church its present height. The Renaissance is held inside: a wood-carved screen of sixty-six oak choir stalls commissioned in 1523 by Bishop Jean de Mauléon, often attributed to the school of the Toulouse sculptor Nicolas Bachelier, and an organ inaugurated in 1535, set high on stone columns and known locally as the Third Wonder of Gascony.
The cathedral is open to visitors throughout the year, with a paid admission for the choir stalls and treasury and reduced hours during winter. The village is reached from the A64 motorway between Toulouse and Tarbes, with the Montréjeau exit followed by about fifteen kilometres on the D26 south. The cathedral has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998 as part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France, listed together with the eleventh-century Basilica of Saint-Just at neighbouring Valcabrère. The Renaissance organ is still played, including during the Festival du Comminges, held each July and August since 1975.