Estaing and Espalion: Two Bridges on the Lot and the Diving-Suit Museum

Required Activities

• Work out from the village where the Coussane runs into the Lot, and see how the 15th-century château is placed to command both: the Sisters of Saint Joseph bought it in 1836 and ran it as a convent, a school and an old people's home, handed it to the commune in 2000, and in 2005 it went for 510,000 euros to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, his brother Olivier and their cousin Philippe — the family that had taken the name in 1922

• Walk across the bridge begun in 1490 — schist with a limestone coping, listed in 2005 — and look over the parapet at its three piers: the cutwaters are triangular on the upstream side and squared off downstream. Then find the second bridge, over the Coussane on the quai Amiral-d'Estaing, with François Mahoux's Virgin and Child of 1866 standing in the middle of it

• Stand on the four pink sandstone arches of Espalion's medieval Pont Vieux, UNESCO-listed on the Compostela routes, and find two things from it: the Vieux Palais of 1572, built by Bernardin de la Valette out of the stones of the church of Saint-Sauveur that the Huguenots had just burned, which the consuls gave him on condition he raised a tower over the fairground; and opposite it the old tanners' houses, the calquières, with their stepped gandoulier slabs jutting into the water where the hides were worked

• In the old Gothic church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, which holds both the Musée Joseph-Vaylet and the diving museum opened on 21 June 1980, find the thing the whole town is built on: the regulator for the flow of compressed gases that the mining engineer Benoît Rouquayrol devised in 1860 to get miners out of gas, adapted for underwater use in 1864 with a pressure tank and a demand valve — the ancestor of every modern diver's regulator