Benedictine Abbey of Our Lady of the Meadow

The spiritual renewal of an abbey with a Renaissance choir.
The monks settled in 1169 on the land offered to them by the Lord of Estouteville. Thus was founded the Abbey of Sainte-Marie de Valmont. A haven of prayer on the hillside, with the sea as its distant horizon and the sky as its daily prayer.

A charming retreat where Delacroix came to sketch the ruins of the romantic sanctuary whose walls mourned the fall of the Ancien Régime in the park of his relatives.

Seduced by the verdant serenity of the site and the religious tradition buried in the memory of the stones, the Benedictine nuns of Lisieux purchased the property in 1994. Thus, the Abbey of Notre-Dame-du-Pré de Valmont was reborn. And as has happened periodically throughout history, this spiritual renewal is accompanied by an architectural redevelopment.

The church is the masterpiece of this resurrection. An abbey choir inherited from a late Middle Ages torn between flamboyant Gothic and Renaissance aesthetics, it was a sumptuous ruin in peril yesterday. But today it is a luminous ode to Marian beauty; an invitation to share a moment in the nuns' lives.