The Abbey of Saint-Savin is one of those sites that I have only visited because it is a WHS. Saint-Savin is off the beaten track and although our visit was in high season (end of August 2015), we had the abbey almost all to ourselves.

The abbey and the church are nothing special, the view from the bridge over the Gartempe is quite nice, but the big (and only) attraction is the wall painting. Most of the murals are on the ceiling of the vaulted nave, four rows of paintings depict scenes from the Old Testament, from the books of Genesis and Exodus. I'm not well versed in the Bible, so I was happy that I had picked up a booklet with explanations at the ticket office. However, some of the scenes are easy to identify, e.g. Noah's Ark, the most striking (shown in Clyde's photo), or the Construction of the Tower of Babel.

About ten years ago the nave was renovated and the murals were cleaned. I do not know how it looked like before, but obviously they have done a good job, the paintings are incredibly well preserved.

"Known as the Romanesque Sistine Chapel" (cited from the sparse description on the WHS website) is clearly overdone, I would rather compare it to the Val du Bois WHS. Apart from the fact, that in Spain most of the originals have been transferred to museums. But style and quality of the murals are comparable.

The drawback with paintings on the ceiling is that you permanently have to put your head back. And that they are at a certain height, in Saint-Savin the nave is 17 metres high. So it's a good idea to view them through a pair of binoculars or the telephoto lens of a camera. I took photos of almost all the paintings, and to be honest, I spotted many details only when I watched the photos on my computer.

Saint-Savin is a half-day trip from the Loire (about 1.5 hours from Tours). We combined it with a visit of Bourges Cathedral and Saint-Hilaire-de-Poitiers in Poitiers (part of French Santiago de Compostela WHS), which means that we spent most of the day in the car. But I ticked off two new WHS, so no question that it was a worthwhile daytrip.