Audio Guide Ronchamp

Ronchamp

Places researched in this city

A selection of the 8 places we've researched in this city. The full set is in the Parroo app.

• Modernist chapel
• Mining heritage
• Monastery architecture
• Bell tower
• War memorial

• 01

  Chapel of Our Lady of the Heights

  Le Corbusier was asked to rebuild a pilgrimage chapel that Allied bombers destroyed in 1944, and he responded with a building that looks like no church before or since: thick, slanting concrete walls, a shell-like curved roof, and asymmetric window openings that flood the interior with coloured light. Completed in 1955 and inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2016, it still draws visitors from around the world to a hilltop in Burgundy-Franche-Comté.

• 02

  Monastery of Saint Clare

  Renzo Piano designed this working monastery for a community of Clarisse sisters whose order had been based continuously in Besançon since around 1250, before they moved to Ronchamp in 2009. Inaugurated in 2011, its green roofs and light concrete construction make the 1,002-square-metre building almost disappear into the hillside beside Le Corbusier's chapel.

• 03

  Jean Prouvé Bell Tower

  Le Corbusier had originally planned an electroacoustic bell tower for the chapel, but funding never materialised and he died in 1965 without seeing it built. Jean Prouvé finally fulfilled that intention in 1975 with a steel portico standing 5.52 metres wide, holding three bells sized according to Le Corbusier's own Modulor proportions.

• 04

  Pyramid of Peace

  When Le Corbusier designed this stepped memorial in the 1950s, he used stones salvaged from the chapel that had been bombed in 1944, giving the structure a literal continuity with what was destroyed. Commissioned by a local veterans' association to honour French soldiers who died on the hill during the Liberation, it sits within the Notre-Dame-du-Haut complex and has been part of the UNESCO site since 2016.

• 05

  Gatehouse of Notre-Dame-du-Haut

  Renzo Piano returned to the Bourlémont hill for a second project alongside his monastery: a visitor gateway built between 2008 and 2011 that uses concrete and transparent glazing to open views across the landscape rather than compete with Le Corbusier's chapel. At 450 square metres, it handles the thousands of annual pilgrims and architecture visitors who arrive at the site each year.

• 06

  Headframe of the Sainte-Marie Shaft

  Sunk between 1864 and 1866 to probe the western edge of the Ronchamp coal basin, the Sainte-Marie shaft reached a seam at 305 metres depth that turned out to be only about 60 centimetres thick, limiting its mining life to just three years before it was repurposed as a ventilation shaft. The reinforced concrete headframe built in 1924 is the only one of its kind still standing in the area and was listed as a Monument Historique in 2001.

• 07

  Marcel-Maulini Mining Museum

  The museum was founded in 1976 by Dr. Marcel Maulini, who spent his career as the last mining doctor in Ronchamp from 1946 until the mines closed in 1958, and whose personal research into silicosis among miners forms a core part of the collection. Spread across three levels, it traces two centuries of coal extraction in the region alongside the social life of the communities that depended on it.

• 08

  1 more places to discover

  In the Parroo app