Cathédrale Saint-Pierre d'Angoulême

The Cathédrale Saint-Pierre d'Angoulême stands on the highest point of the old town plateau, a large Romanesque building whose west facade is one of the most elaborately carved in France. Built in the early 12th century and much restored in the 19th, the facade shows the distinctive Saintonge style of Romanesque decoration at its most ambitious: four horizontal bands of carved figures, interlacing, foliage, and architectural motifs covering the entire surface from ground level to the roofline.

The interior, heavily restored by Paul Abadie in the 1870s, is spacious and well-lit. The dome over the crossing is particularly impressive. The exterior, especially the apse seen from the gardens below the ramparts, gives a good sense of the original Romanesque massing. The cathedral sits at the edge of the plateau and the gardens to its east offer one of the better viewpoints in the city.

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The cathedral was largely rebuilt in the 1870s by Paul Abadie, the architect who later designed the Sacré-Cœur basilica in Paris. Abadie's restoration was controversial even at the time — he replaced much of the original fabric with new stone while claiming to be restoring what had been there — and remains controversial among architectural historians today. But the west facade, which he altered less drastically, is considered one of the finest examples of Saintonge Romanesque work in existence: four bands of carved figures and ornament covering every centimetre of the surface, with Christ in Majesty at the centre of the top tier.