Abbey of St Gall - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Hey everyone, I'm Joel on the Road, and today my UNESCO World Heritage journey is at the Abbey of St Galle in Switzerland. So this is the Abbey of St Galle, and it's in the city of St Gallen in north-eastern Switzerland. Now it's been here as a monastery since about the 8th century, founded during the Carolingian era, and it's been historically one of the most important monasteries in all of Europe. Now the buildings here mostly actually date from the 17th and 18th centuries, so they're not very old. But what is super impressive, and the main reason for the World Heritage listing here, is the library, which has a huge collection of medieval books and manuscripts and parchments as well. So let's go and check it out. Now this is the Abbey Library, and it contains over 170,000 works, and of those, some 400 date from before the year 1000, making it one of the greatest collections of old manuscripts anywhere in the world. And now what you can see behind me is where a lot of them are held, which is the 17th century Baroque-style library hall, but unfortunately we're not allowed to film in there, so this is actually just a picture. So this is one of the most remarkable pieces in the Abbey Library's collection, and it's an architectural plan for an ideal monastery, and it dates from around 820 AD. It's one of the earliest surviving architectural plans still in existence. And although the particular monastery behind me was never built, it gives you a really good insight into how designers and planners at the time were thinking. It's been a really interesting stop, this one, because I've always found it fascinating how culture develops, and language, and all that sort of stuff, so to see such old manuscripts and works of literature, very, very interesting, reminds me a lot of Trinity College in Dublin, and of course the University Library in Coimbra in Portugal as well. But that's it from me, thank you very much for watching, don't forget to like and subscribe I'm Joel on the Road, and I'll see you at the next World Heritage Site!