Remote Sensing of Cultural Heritage Sites
Mont Saint Michel, France (1/2)
In a bay bearing the same name, the abbey of Mont Saint Michel is perched on a small granitic island in the midst of vast sandbanks exposed to powerful tides between Brittany and Normandy, in the northwest of France. This Gothic-style Benedictine abbey was built between the 11th and 16th centuries and dedicated to the archangel St Michael. Mont Saint Michel, also known as the 'Wonder of the West', is a technical and artistic tour de force, having had to adapt to the problems posed by this unique natural site.
Because of the unprecedented union between a natural site and its architecture ensemble, the co-existence of the abbey and its fortified village within the confined limits of a small island, and because of its importance as a medieval Christian civilization site, Mont Saint Michel and its bay was inscribed to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979.
The abbey of Mont Saint Michel is established on a rocky islet measuring 900 meters in circumference at its base and 80 meters at its peak, which stands out above the sandy fringe of earth covered by the heavy tides (nearly 2 kilometres from the solid ground). It is said that long ago, this rocky needle dominated a forest which, at the beginning of the 8th century was swallowed up by a tidal wave. At any rate, this exceptional situation, a narrow prominence lost between land and sea, has implicitly determined the implantation and development of the abbey, as well as the practical and aesthetic solutions imprinted in the stones of the building itself, inseparable, as always, from it's natural environment which explains it and to which it may attribute its specific value.
The abbey predominates a tiny village which clings to the foot of the mountain. It forms an architectural complex of great originality, built by successive restructurings and additions through out the Middle Ages. The monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel au péril de la mer was founded in 966 by Benedictine monks.
