Priory of Santa Maria del Vilar, Romanesque priory church in Villelongue-dels-Monts, Pyrénées-Orientales, France.

The Priory of Santa Maria del Vilar is a Romanesque church with a single nave, a transept with an apse chapel, and a semicircular apse, built of light beige stone. Its flat-faced bell tower rises above the main body, topped by a small gabled belfry with an open arch holding a bell. The church preserves Romanesque wall paintings in the apse and stands within a rough grey-brown stone complex with terracotta tiled roofs and round archways.

A Roman temple of the 1st century BC was found during excavations in 1998. The site is first mentioned on 16 May 1089, when Na Adalaiza and her son Arnau gave a farmstead to the Augustinian priory of Lladó on condition that its revenues go to the church of Santa Maria del Vilar. A new church was built in the early 12th century and consecrated in 1142 by Udalgar I de Castelnou, bishop of Elne.

The name Vilar denotes an isolated farm or hamlet dependent on Villelongue; in the 11th century the church was recorded as Sancta Marie de Vilari. Since 1994 the site has hosted the Festival international lyrique et médiéval du Vilar for a few weeks each summer. A plaque unveiled on 11 November 2023 honours Captain Paul Berge, a Perpignan native of the Berthelot mission who fell in Romania in August 1917.

The site lies in the Albères above Villelongue-dels-Monts, reached by a narrow climbing road, so allow time for the final stretch. The church is oriented east, with the apse and its Romanesque frescoes at the far end from the entrance. The cloister was dismantled in 1924 and brought back from the Paris region in the 1990s, so parts are reconstructions.

A plaque unveiled on 11 November 2023 honours Captain Paul Berge, a Perpignan-born officer of the French military mission in Romania, killed there in August 1917. He helped halt the Central Powers' advance on the eastern front, and the officer gravely wounded in that fighting was Erwin Rommel.