Explorer Villeneuve-lès-Avignon

Fort Saint-André is a 14th-century fortress on Mont Andaon above Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, built by the French kings facing papal Avignon across the Rhône. Its curtain wall enclosed a Benedictine abbey and a village; visitors enter through the twin-towered gatehouse, walk the ramparts and look out over Avignon and the Palais des Papes.

The Pont Saint-Bénézet, the Pont d'Avignon of the children's song, was a stone bridge across the Rhône, rebuilt from 1234 with 22 arches over about 900 metres. Floods brought arches down and it was abandoned in the 17th century; four arches survive, carrying the Chapel of Saint Nicholas on the second pier, and visitors can walk out along them.

The Musée du Petit Palais occupies the former palace of the archbishops of Avignon, begun around 1318 and remodelled under Giuliano della Rovere in the late 15th century. Opened in 1976, it shows Italian paintings from the 13th to the early 16th century from the Campana collection, including a Madonna and Child by Botticelli, and medieval painting and sculpture from Avignon.

The Rocher des Doms is a rocky outcrop above the Rhône beside the Palais des Papes, settled since the Neolithic. Its summit holds a 19th-century English-style garden of about 3 hectares with a pond, statues of local figures and a terrace 30 m above the river looking over the Pont Saint-Bénézet and the Rhône valley.

Avignon Cathedral, Notre-Dame-des-Doms, is a Romanesque church built mainly in the second half of the 12th century on the rock beside the Palais des Papes, and the seat of the Archbishop of Avignon. Its bell tower, rebuilt in 1425, has carried a gilded statue of the Virgin since 1859, and inside is the Gothic tomb of Pope John XXII, who died in 1334.

The Palais des Papes was the residence of the popes in Avignon during the 14th century, built mainly between 1335 and 1352 under Benedict XII and Clement VI. The fortified Gothic palace joins the Old and the New Palace, and the visit leads through great halls, chapels and papal apartments, some painted with frescoes by Matteo Giovannetti. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Calvet Museum is Avignon's fine arts museum, founded on the collections that the physician Esprit Calvet left to the city in 1810. It occupies the Hôtel de Villeneuve-Martignan, a mansion completed in 1749 to designs by Jean-Baptiste Franque, and shows paintings from the 16th to the 20th century, including David's Death of Young Bara, with sculpture and decorative arts.