Saint-Émilion: The Wine Town Built From Its Own Underground Quarries
Everything in this picture came out of the same hill. The vines grow in a thin skin of clay over limestone, the houses are cut from that limestone, and the bell tower stands on top of a church that was never really built. It was dug. Saint-Émilion spent the better part of eight hundred years quarrying itself, and the town you see is sitting on the holes it made.
You don’t notice it much at street level. The stone is a pale limestone that turns honey-coloured in the late afternoon, and geologists call it calcaire à astéries, starfish limestone, after the fossil fragments scattered through it. On the plateau above town there’s often only half a metre of soil before you hit rock. That same rock drains the vineyards, holds up the houses and, as it turns out, hides a second town underneath.
Eight Hundred Years of Digging
People have been taking stone out from under Saint-Émilion since at least the fourteenth century, and the church carving started well before that. A lot of it left town. Blocks went down to the Dordogne and on to Libourne and Bordeaux. The rest went up the street: the houses in the frame, the ramparts, the collegiate church, the steep stepped lanes the locals call tertres.
What’s left behind is hard to picture. More than a hundred kilometres of galleries have been mapped under the town and right around it, stacked four levels deep in places, with the lowest about 24 metres down. For the wider district the figure people quote is around 200 kilometres.
The men who cut it didn’t get much out of it. Some worked the vines by day and the quarries by night, and some lived in cave dwellings hollowed out of the rock. The stone face on the left of the photo, with its doorways cut straight into the cliff, is the kind of place they lived.
A Church Carved Out of Solid Rock
The town takes its name from Émilion, a Breton monk who came here in the eighth century and lived as a hermit in a cave. After he died, pilgrims started turning up at his tomb, and plenty of them were already on the road to Santiago de Compostela anyway.
In the early twelfth century the monks gave them somewhere to stand. They carved a church out of the rock beside the hermit’s cave, working from the top down, cutting the roof line first and then emptying out the nave, and leaving the pillars as uncut stone. Something like 15,000 cubic metres of rock came out. What’s left is a hall about 38 metres long and 20 wide, three naves under a vault around 11 metres high. It’s the largest underground church in Europe, and from outside you’d hardly know it was there.
The tower is the part you can see. Its base went up in the twelfth century, right over the church, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was raised in Gothic style to a 68-metre spire. Nobody had designed the rock below to carry that. A buttress was added in 1626, which only added more weight. By the late twentieth century the tower, around 3,000 tonnes of it, was bearing down on medieval pillars with water seeping through the stone around them. Concrete columns went in as emergency props, and in 1996 the World Monuments Fund put the church on its watch list. It has been under repair on and off ever since.
It’s a strange thing to stand in. The church is holding up its own steeple, and both were cut from the same hill.
When the Holes Got Too Big
The nineteenth century was the worst of it. Demand for stone grew with the industrial boom, and the galleries got wider and deeper. In the 1890s the authorities ordered quarrying to stop. People kept shaving bits off the big support pillars anyway, and the ground started to give. In places the vineyards on top became too risky to drive a tractor across.
A good share of Saint-Émilion’s wine money has since gone into holding the ground up. Some estates have spent years shoring up the galleries under their vines before they could safely replant.
What’s Down There Now
Once the quarrymen left, the mushroom growers moved in, and they stayed until the middle of the twentieth century. Older residents remember cycling through the tunnels, and a few remember riding mopeds or even driving cars down there.
These days it’s mostly wine. The galleries sit at 12 to 14 degrees all year, which is about as good as a cellar gets without trying. Clos Fourtet, one of the top estates, has around 13 hectares of old quarry under its vines. The Cordeliers cloister in town has about three kilometres of tunnels and has been using them to make sparkling wine since the late nineteenth century.
If you want to see the underground part of the town, you have to book a guided tour at the tourist office. The doors to the monuments only open with a guide. It takes about 45 minutes and covers Émilion’s cave, the Trinity Chapel with its medieval wall paintings, the catacombs and the church itself. The cave has a stone seat that’s supposed to help women conceive. The guides will tell you it works.
Most of Saint-Émilion is underground. The part you can see is what they took out.