Abbaye Saint-Mathieu de Fine-Terre

About

The Saint-Mathieu Abbey of Fine-Terre (or Saint-Mahe Abbey) was an abbey of Lower Brittany, whose ruins lie on the territory of the present-day commune of Plougonvelin on the point Saint-Mathieu (Beg Lokmaze in Breton), in the department of Finistère, which might owe him his name. Dominating the mooring of any ship from prehistory on the channel of the Four and then trading during antiquity on the tin of the Cassitérides to Phoenicia, it knew from 1157, under the impulse of the Viscounts of Léon collecting their right of break, an exceptional radiation and in the 14th century became the center of a city of more than two thousand inhabitants with a port to international activity, which it was hard to imagine when we saw the almost deserted place of today. A romantic site to wish for, this promontory from the end of the world to harsh inhospitableness inspires the famous French historian of the 19th century Jules Michelet a tormented vision:

" It's the extreme limit, the tip, the bow of the old world. There, the two enemies are opposite: the land and the sea, man and nature. You have to see her when she moves, the furious, what monstrous waves she piles up...