Oradour-sur-Glane and Saint-Junien: The Martyred Village, the Glove Makers and Corot's Valley

Required Activities

• Go through the Centre de la Mémoire first, then walk the main street of the ruined village to the place du Champ-de-Foire where the people were ordered to assemble, and in the burnt-out church find the middle of the three openings in the choir — the one Marguerite Rouffanche, the only woman to come out of it alive, reached with a candle-lighter's stepladder and dropped three metres from

• In the collegiate church of Saint-Junien, find the 12th-century limestone tomb of the hermit Junien behind the altar and the nave fresco of the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse, then step outside and look at the central bell tower, rebuilt mostly in concrete after it came down on the morning of 15 December 1922

• Go into the Cité du cuir, opened in December 2025, then find a pair of Saint-Junien gloves cut by one of the three factories left in a town that once had sixteen glove works and thirteen tanneries, and that still supplies Hermès, Dior and Lanvin

• Walk into the gorge of the Glane where Corot painted in the 1850s and find two things on the right bank: Henri Coutheillas's bronze medallion of the painter, sealed into a rock above the water in 1904, and the chalet that housed him, rebuilt to the original and opened again in 2009