After Saint-Macaire we continued south and stopped in Bazas, another historic town that we wanted to see rather than simply drive past. We arrived with the motorhome and spent some time walking through the centre, where almost everything seems to lead towards the enormous Place de la Cathédrale. Bazas is not a large city, which made it particularly pleasant for a short stop: once away from the motorhome we could explore it easily on foot, wandering through the old streets before reaching the main square and the cathedral that completely dominates it. As happens quite often when travelling this way, the place turned out to be considerably more interesting than we had expected from looking at it on the map.
The Place de la Cathédrale is the heart of Bazas and was the part of the town that impressed us most. It is a large, elongated square surrounded by old houses, arcades and former private mansions, with the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste closing one end of it. The scale of the building seems almost disproportionate for a town of this size. Bazas was once the seat of an important bishopric and, during the Middle Ages, a powerful administrative and religious centre for the surrounding region, which explains why such an imposing cathedral was built here. The present Gothic building dates principally from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although it incorporates traces of an earlier Romanesque church. Its western façade is particularly remarkable, with three richly sculpted portals, a rose window and an unusually elaborate collection of medieval stone figures.
The cathedral suffered badly during the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, but much of the sculpted façade survived. Since 1998 it has formed part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France, as Bazas stands on the Vézelay route traditionally followed by pilgrims heading towards Spain. This connection with the pilgrimage routes is still visible in the history of the town, which once provided accommodation and care for travellers heading south. Around the cathedral we also found the older character of Bazas in the arcaded square and the streets leading away from it, where historic houses and fragments of the former fortified town survive among the later buildings.
Bazas itself has a history stretching back far beyond the Middle Ages. The area was associated with the Vasates, the ancient people from whom the town eventually took its name, and it became an important settlement under Roman rule. Later it developed into one of the principal towns of the Bazadais, protected by walls and monumental gateways and visited over the centuries by figures including Richard the Lionheart, Francis I, Charles V, Catherine de’ Medici, Louis XIV and Napoleon. Another local tradition which is still very much alive is the Bazadaise cattle breed, originally used as a working animal in this part of south-western France and now particularly prized for its meat.
For us, however, Bazas was primarily another discovery made simply by stopping the motorhome and walking into a town that could easily have been just another name along the route. We enjoyed the contrast between the relatively small scale of the historic centre and the extraordinary size of the cathedral, as well as the feeling of the main square, which still looks like the centre of a much more important medieval city. It did not require an entire day, but it was well worth stopping rather than continuing straight through. These relatively short visits have become an important part of our journey through France: instead of travelling directly between the best-known destinations, the motorhome keeps bringing us into smaller historic towns such as Bazas, where there is often far more to discover than we had expected.