We wrote about the Saturday market in Sarlat a few days ago. This time we’d like to show you the town.
Wikipedia says the center of Sarlat is an excellent example of a French town in the 1300s, because “modern history has passed it by.” I’m guessing that wasn’t so great for the inhabitants, but it does make it a fascinating place to visit. Dozens of narrow alleyways beckon us to explore.
Some of the buildings look pretty decrepit…
And some just look very narrow!
We visited Sarlat back in 2004 and vividly remember a night when they lit the central square:
We were both surprised to find the town center to be much smaller than we remembered.
One thing that’s still just as big as we remembered – the doors on this church!
It was actually a pretty small church (now it’s a market) – why did it need such enormous doors??
The gardens behind the (larger) Sarlat cathedral have an unusual, bullet-shaped building called a “Lantern for the Dead”.
The WWII memorial in Sarlat makes distinctions between the types of dead, something we hadn’t seen in other regions – died in combat, civil victims “of the Nazi barbarity”, and deported and interned. In Domme, it was even more explicit – one of the categories was “Shot”.
Some more views of downtown Sarlat:
Our French Adventure 