The Cour Mably features a twelfth-century vaulted chapter house built for the Couvent des Jacobins. Its pointed arches and stone ribs survived the demolition of the surrounding convent complex during the nineteenth century. While the city…
Quiet Courtyards and Passages
This walk leads you through the quietest stone passages, forgotten inner courtyards, and silent residential alleys of old Bordeaux. It offers a tranquil escape from the bustling shopping avenues, showing how the city's scale shifts as soon as you turn a corner.
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1. Cour Mably - Salle Capitulaire
2. Passage Sarget
Passage Sarget is a narrow, covered gallery tucked between the Cours de l'Intendance and the Place de la Comédie. It features a distinct iron and glass canopy, a design intended to shield shoppers from the rain while they walked between…
3. Impasse de la Merci
The Impasse de la Merci is a narrow, stone-walled dead end that cuts into the dense fabric of the Bordeaux city center. It takes its name from the Order of Mercy, a religious group that built a monastery here in the early seventeenth…
4. Rue du Puits Descujols
The Rue du Puits Descujols is a narrow, quiet passage defined by the high stone walls of the surrounding apartment blocks. It takes its name from a local merchant, Jean Descujols, who owned a private well on this spot in the fourteenth…
5. Vinet Garden
The Vinet Garden sits enclosed by high stone walls on the rue Vinet, marked by a wrought iron gate that reveals a dense pocket of greenery tucked away from the surrounding streets. This plot once belonged to the private mansion of the…
6. Passage de la Tour de Gassies
The Passage de la Tour de Gassies consists of a narrow, shadowed stone corridor tucked between taller buildings. It survives as a rare medieval remnant in a city heavily rebuilt in the eighteenth century. A local merchant named Gassies…
7. Passage des Argentiers
The Passage des Argentiers features a narrow, cobbled path lined with tall, seventeenth-century limestone facades that lean slightly inward. It earned its name from the silversmiths who once filled these cramped shopfronts, crafting…
8. Impasse de la Rue Neuve
The Impasse de la Rue Neuve is a narrow, quiet dead end tucked away from the main thoroughfare. It owes its name to the Rue Neuve, or New Street, which was laid out in the seventeen hundreds during a massive urban expansion ordered by the…