Rennes-le-Chateau

A famous treasure mystery shown to be fraud and hoax

A hilltop village in the Aude with fewer than a hundred residents is the most famous treasure site in France, and none of the treasure story is older than the 1950s.

The real history is thin and human. Bérenger Saunière was the parish priest here from 1885, and he spent conspicuously: restoring the church, building a villa and a tower, living better than a country curé should. There is a documented explanation for the money that has nothing to do with buried gold. He was selling masses, taking stipends by post from far more people than he could possibly say masses for, and the Church eventually disciplined him for exactly that.

The treasure arrives in the 1950s with a restaurateur named Noël Corbu, who had bought Saunière's property and needed a reason for people to drive up a hill to his hotel. Corbu told a newspaper that the priest had found a hoard connected to Blanche of Castile. It worked. Visitors came.

Then it got much bigger. A Parisian named Pierre Plantard attached himself to the story and used it to promote the Priory of Sion, which he presented as a secret order a thousand years old. It was not. Plantard and his collaborator Philippe de Chérisey manufactured documents, including the Dossiers Secrets planted in the Bibliothèque nationale, to give it a paper trail. The whole apparatus has been comprehensively debunked, and Plantard's claims collapsed under legal scrutiny in France. That did not stop the material being taken up by bestselling books and, eventually, by The Da Vinci Code.

Go anyway. The village is real, the church with its unsettling decoration is real, Saunière's tower is real, and the view over the Razès is worth the climb. Just go knowing you are visiting a hoax that outgrew its inventor, which is a rarer thing to stand in than a treasure site.