The best museums Midi-Pyrénées

Furniture, tools, these testimonies of the past, which the inhabitants of the region bring, enrich the museum every day to rebuild the collections previously exposed in the halls of the castle of Castanet. Gradually, local heritage revives, thanks to a passionate association.

This museum of sacred art, the only one of its kind in the region, is one of the highlights of Pont-Saint-Esprit. Located in the Maison des Chevaliers, a 12th century building, it presents, in a very successful museographic dimension, ceremonial rooms, 14th and 15th century frescoes as well as a superb collection of religious goldsmithery. One passes from one era or civilization to another without chronology, with the artistic expression of the sacred as the guiding thread.

In the heart of an exceptional landscape, the access to the abbey founded by William of Orange and classified today as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, is through the cloister. The museum is located in the former refectory of the monks. Its collections bring together pieces from the old abbey and cover fifteen centuries of sculpture, since the Gallo-Roman era. An amphitheater allows visitors to travel through twelve centuries of history thanks to a 17-minute film and a virtual reconstruction allows visitors to imagine the cloister as it was in its original state.

The Lespugue Museum will allow you to discover the "Venus de Lespugue", a famous statuette dating back 23 000 years BC, discovered in 1922! Also known as the Mona Préhistoire, it belongs to the treasures of humanity. In Lespugue, however, you can only admire the reproduction, the original being at the Man's museum in Paris. In this historic place, you can also discover prehistoric tools, parts of solutréenne and magdalenian eras, as well as commingeoises ceramics from the Middle Ages.

Elian and Xavier da Silva are passionate about martial arts. With their association Military Collection, they have created a museum of veterans for freedom, whose name could be misleading. It is a museum dedicated to contemporary conflicts, where 1 200 pieces of collection concerning the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 are exposed. You will see many uniforms, authentic weapons, memorabilia from the resistance against the German occupiers in the Southwest, American army vehicles, etc.

It took two years of work to transform the Museum of Prehistory (created in 1952) into a museum of art and archaeology. 3,500 objects from the excavations carried out in the surrounding scrublands, most of them dating from the Neolithic period, are displayed in twelve themed showcases. There are flint and bone tools, ceramics, arrows, etc., as well as a variety of other objects. Projected films explain how they were made and a touch screen displays clips.