Rennes-le-Château

Rennes- le -Château ( Rènnas del Castèl in Occitan ) is a medieval village with 62 inhabitants (as of 1 January 2011) in southern France, 481 meters above sea level, in the Aude department in the Languedoc- Roussillon region, about 40 kilometers south from Carcassonne and about twelve miles from the Pic de Bugarach.

The village

Besides not to visit shared Château d' Hautpoul there are in the village and inaugurated in 1059, the Romanesque in the core village church Sainte Marie -Madeleine, which was renovated by Bérenger Saunière, the then parish priest of the place, in 1891 and transformed popular. Only by the modern myth they became widely known. A restaurant and a bookstore are visited by tourists as well as the location on a hill library tower of the Abbé, the Tour Magdala. A few meters next door Saunière built his house, the Villa Bethania, which is separated from the tower by a large garden.

Modern legends

The restaurant owner Noel Corbu acquired in 1946, the Villa Bethania Abbé herein and opened a restaurant in 1950. He claimed from the Abbé, these have around 1900 in the village together with the treasures of the Templars ( Templar treasure ), Cathar or even Goths found the Holy Grail and became immensely rich. Saunière had an apparently hidden there old parchment with a strange Christian message found in the renovation of the altar. Pierre Plantard took the rumors in his mythology of the Priory of Sion and spread it that way.

Notoriety attained the place for the first time by the bestseller The Holy Grail and his heirs, in which the British authors Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh, the legend of Rennes- le -Château processed. Umberto Eco in 1988 used elements from it for his novel Foucault's Pendulum. Dan Brown took up the theme again for his bestseller The Da Vinci Code from 2003, whereby the subject still more widely found. Also in 2003, appeared in the German-speaking area of the novel, The Heiress of the grail by Helene Luise Koeppel, who plays in Rennes -le- Château. Also in the 2006 novel, The Magdalene Gospel by Kathleen McGowan, published in 2007 the novel calix of DL Wilson and published in 2008 in the novel The eighth card of the author Kate Mosse is the place becomes the central point of the plot.

By speculation about Saunière experienced the village for many years a boom in tourism, its by- product are numerous amateur excavations of treasure seekers.

Trivia

The computer game Gabriel Knight 3 - Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned plays in Rennes -le- Château and its surroundings.