Chapelle de l'Ermitage de Notre-Dame-des-Mines, Medieval chapel on Ermitage hill in Alès, France

This chapel sits on a hilltop outside Alès and is built from limestone blocks. The small sanctuary offers views across the surrounding mountains and countryside from its elevated position.

Monks of the priory of Saint-Germain-de-Montaigu built the chapel in the 11th–12th centuries on the site of a Gallic oppidum, to house elderly or infirm monks; the hill was then called Saint-Julien-des-Causses. Abandoned in 1561 and ruined in the Wars of Religion, it was restored and enlarged from 1718 by Brother Esprit Boyer, a Carmelite, with work completed in 1736 as a stone inscription in the courtyard records.

The name Notre-Dame-des-Mines was adopted in 1874, referring to the coal-mining basin of Alès rather than to any gathering of miners at the chapel. The sanctuary had been reconsecrated to the Virgin Mary in 1872 after the 1854 cholera epidemic, when the curé of Alès led a pilgrimage of more than 10,000 people to Notre-Dame-de-Laval, 15 km away.

The summit belvedere is reached by a paved road, not a footpath from the town centre. The hill rises 291 m, about 150 m above Alès, and the belvedere looks over the Cévennes and Bas-Vivarais. The chapel keeps a Romanesque choir with a cul-de-four apse, and a well stands in the crypt.

The cast iron Virgin, 5.15 metres tall, was donated and erected by the forges of Alès in 1874, the year the sanctuary took the name Notre-Dame-des-Mines. Look for the blue band near its peak and the thin pole held in the outstretched arm.