Abondance: The Painted Cloister and the Monks' Cheese

Required Activities

• Work round the 14th-century cloister picking out the scenes from the life of the Virgin painted in the 1430s, then find the gallery that has none — the north walk and its paintings were brought down by the collapse of the nave after a fire, and only two bays of that nave were ever rebuilt, finished in 1481

• Buy Abondance cut from the wheel in the valley that named it and check it against the appellation: a semi-cooked pressed disc 7 to 8 cm high with a visibly concave rim, cut from a meule of 6 to 12 kg, and tasting of hazelnut

• Pick the Abondance cows out of the valley herds, which also run montbéliarde and tarine: a dark mahogany-red coat with white head, belly and legs, and the red rings round the eyes that work as sunglasses against high-altitude glare

• In the abbey church next door, name the four Fathers of the Church and the four Evangelists on the vaults painted between 1839 and 1845, find the short wooden gallery — 7 m long and barely 1.3 m deep — hung in the south transept, and on the way out identify the three figures in the stained glass over the door: Jean d'Abondance, the blessed Ponce de Sixt and François de Sales, who reformed this abbey in the early 17th century