The royal burial site of the House of Savoy

Hautecombe Abbey, situated in Saint-Pierre-de-Curtille, Savoie, France, was a former Cistercian monastery, later a Benedictine monastery. For centuries, the Counts and Dukes of Savoy were buried at Hautecombe Abbey, which is visited by 150,000 tourists annually.

Founded about 1101 by hermits from Aulps Abbey, near Lake Geneva, the community moved to the north-western shore of Lake Bourget under Mont du Chat in about 1125. It was granted to the community by Amadeus III, Count of Savoy, who is named as the founder, and shortly afterwards it accepted the Cistercian Rule from Clairvaux.

Count Humbert III, known as ‘Blessed’, his wife Anne, and Archbishop Boniface of Savoy, Archbishop of Canterbury (1245–1270), were all interred at Hautecombe Abbey. Count Aymon, Count of Savoy financed the expansion of a burial chapel at Hautecombe which was constructed from 1331 to 1342.

The abbey was restored in a debased style by one of the dukes about 1750, but it was secularized and sold in 1792, when the French entered Savoy, and was turned into a china-factory. King Charles Felix of Sardinia purchased the ruins in 1824 and had the church re-constructed by the Piedmontese architect Ernest Melano in an exuberant Gothic-Romantic style. The church is 66 metres long with a transept 26 metres wide, and is adorned with some 300 statues and many frescoes. Most of the tombs are little more than reproductions of the medieval monuments.

In 1826 the Cistercians resettled the abbey from Turin, but the Italian monks soon left, and were replaced by others from Sénanque Abbey, who remained until about 1884. In 1922 the premises were taken over by the Benedictines of Priory of St. Madeleine in Marseilles, who left in 1992 for Ganagobie Abbey in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence to get away from the increasing tourist flow. The buildings are now administered by the Chemin Neuf Community.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons