Religious heritage

The Abbey of Aulne was founded around 637 on the wooded banks of the Sambre. Golden years and disaster succeeded for centuries, but the French Revolution dealt the abbey the final blow.

The Belgian army erected an observation post on the remains of the presbytery of St Catherine's Chapel in Pervijze during World War I. 

The thousand inhabitants of the French village of Ornes, on the edge of a forest in the early 20th century, were awoken from their idyllic lives at the outbreak of the First World War.

Around 620, a community of monks founded an abbey atop the hill of the French village of Montfaucon d'Argonne. 

In the 1960s, the inhabitants of the Spanish town of Jánovas were forced to leave their houses in order to build a reservoir and dam which were never actually built.

More than a hundred years ago, on May 12, 1917, the biplane of Count Paul de Goussencourt and Lieutenant de Cubber thundered from the sky during a firefight above Kaaskerke, a small town part of Diksmuide. Both died instantly.

In the valley of the River Thyle, a group of monks came together in 1146 to build the Villers Abbey.

The monastic ruins of Tintern Abbey rest on the banks of the Wye in Wales. Like the abbey of Villers-la-Ville in Belgium, Tintern Abbey was populated by monks of the Cistercian Order.