What You Might Not Know About Mont-Saint-Michel France's Famous Monastery

It looks like a movie set, but this island actually exists. You'll find it in Normandy, France. Mont Saint-Michel, as it's called, is a social media sensation. But does it live up to the hype? And are you aware of its many secrets? Yeah, it's like, wow, how did they build this? Amazing. So cool. From the outer route, you can see it from about 10, 20 kilometers away, you can see the Mont Saint-Michel. It's unbelievable. Mont Saint-Michel was one of the most difficult construction projects of the Middle Ages. And when visiting today, it can get very dangerous. But more on that later. Those who do arrive unscathed can discover many secrets. Hello, I'm Anne. I'm a guide in the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel for nine years. And with those keys, I'm going to show you secret places. You can cross the two kilometer long bridge to the island at low tide by foot or shuttle bus. Around 3.5 million visitors come here every year. So it can get pretty crowded. My tip is here is to come in January or December. So it gets very, very quiet. You feel like almost alone in the village. And you get also very beautiful lights. The landscape is beautiful here. And important tides as well, which is quite spectacular. This is the West Terrace, where you'll find the abbey church entrance. It was built on this hill from the 11th century onwards. Many buildings are built or stacked on top of each other. How did they achieve this back in the day? It's hard to believe how they built such buildings on the mound here. Mont Saint-Michel is like a rocky cone, something like a pyramid. We are almost on the summit at 80 meters above the sea level. Try to imagine here a system of flat boats. According to the tides, those medieval builders brought all the construction materials on those flat boats, barges actually, from different places of Normandy, even from England. There's a huge height difference between low and high tide in the bay, sometimes by as much as 14 meters. At low tide, you can walk to the island across the tidal flats. But it's best to go with a guided group. Otherwise it can get dangerous. Don't venture by yourself into the bay. Because in the past, even quite recently, people can still get stuck in the bay because of those quicksands. And if you have still a big proportion of water inside, it gets like a soak-in effect. If the tide is coming in, if you're alone, if you can't get out of those, you know, potential quicksands, that could be dangerous. Mont Saint-Michel Abbey combines Romanesque and Gothic architecture. There are plenty of secrets waiting to be discovered here. But first, Anne leads us to this dorm. And now, a little passage that not everybody gets to see, actually. We're going to go higher into the abbey. So we are now on the terrace of the choir of the abbey church. These flying buttresses are typical of Gothic architecture and are carrying weight on the outside. One of them is actually a passageway. Well, this is here, built on a flying buttress, the lace staircase. It's like lace design into the granite. And that was built back in the Middle Ages here. So you have actually here almost the top of the mount, the only access to the bell tower, just here on the left. And finally, the Archangel Saint Michael on the very top, used also as a lightning rod, protecting against potential storms, lightning here, because that's what caused big damages in the past. A thousand years ago, Benedictine monks lived here for many centuries. Today, the island is mainly a tourist attraction. But in the Middle Ages, scores of pilgrims flocked to the island. But guess what? A few monks and nuns actually still live here today. Actually, five monks and seven nuns, all together, twelve, and they're having services three times a day. It's like the convention with the French government to do services into that monument. And in exchange, they have a place for them, private, obviously. And lastly, time to reveal Mont Saint-Michel's darkest secret. Two isolation cells to lock up particularly serious offenders. From the French Revolution until the year 1863, the abbey was used as a prison. You can see here inscriptions from probably prisoners that stayed here for long, long hours or long days of detention. Some of the prisoners actually wrote their years of sufferance in different places. Imagine how awful it was to stay here. Much of what has happened on the island over the different centuries is yet to be researched, and some things will remain forever unknown. And so Le Mont Saint-Michel remains a deeply mysterious place.