Heritage
The Abbey museum of Gaillac
In the vaulted cellars of Saint-Michel Abbey, the Abbey museum tells the story of the country beyond wine: a Gallo-Roman mosaic, sacred art, navigation on the Tarn, the journeymen's guilds. A small but dense museum, granted the Musée de France label.
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Saint-Michel Abbey is more than its church and its Maison des Vins: in its vaulted cellars it also houses the Abbey museum, one of Gaillac’s three museums. You go in for what wine doesn’t tell — archaeology, sacred art, the life of the valley.
A thousand years of the valley, beneath the vaults
Set in the abbey’s cellars — red-brick vaults reworked in the nineteenth century by the architect Alexandre Du Mège, and painted in 1940 by Louis Cabanes (stylised vine stocks, the coats of arms of the towns that supplied the cellar) — the museum has held the “Musée de France” label since 2003. It gathers a fifth-century Gallo-Roman mosaic (the abbey stands on an ancient villa) and capitals from the excavations, but also a whole account of local life: navigation on the Tarn, down which the wines once travelled, with a model gabare barge; three galleries devoted to the vine and wine — AOC terroirs, old tools, cooperage; and sacred art, with a thirteenth-century polychrome wooden Virgin and Child and a Louis XIV liturgical set. A section is devoted to the journeymen’s guilds. Among the star pieces: the Town Weight and the sculpted group known as the Griffoul. A small museum, but a dense one.
The museum also hosts occasional temporary exhibitions — check the current programme before you come.
One of Gaillac’s three museums
The Abbey museum forms, with the Fine Arts museum (at Château de Foucaud) and the Philadelphe Thomas natural history museum, the three municipal museums. A single 8-euro pass opens all three doors, and on the second Sunday of each month the permanent collections are free — enough to chain sacred art, fine arts and the cabinet of curiosities in a single day.
