KS5 French Listening - Le Patrimoine Vézelay

This KS5 French listening exercise is ideal for Le Patrimoine unit. ’Vézelay, un bijou perché au sommet de sa colline’, takes the listener on a visit to the medieval town of Vézelay in the department of Yonne in Burgundy. On the edge of Avallonais, Vézelay is a major site for Christianity. The beautiful Church situated on a hill at the top of a charming village was granted the title of Basilica by the Holy See in 1920 and is dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen whose relics are displayed for veneration in the crypt. It was named as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1979 and provides one of the 4 starting points in France for the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela.

Thomas Beckett chose Vézelay for his Whitsunday sermon in 1166, announcing the excommunication of the main supporters of Henry II and threatening the King with excommunication too.

Accompanying the YouTube video this resource includes a full transcript of the audio, and some exam style questions.

Maison Claire Fontaine is a French language immersion and activity centre for UK school children based in the beautiful Burgundian countryside. We have been producing these videos during the coronovirus to hopefully provide the opportunity for a bit of Burgundy to find its way to UK school children whilst they cannot travel to Burgundy themselves.

We offer all these resources for free. However, if you have found them useful we would be enormously grateful if you could share them with others as well as promote our online French lessons and conversation classes to your pupils, fellow teachers and parents. Our teachers would love to hear from anyone who would like to improve their own French speaking with fun, enthusiastic and experienced French native speakers based here in Burgundy.

We value your feedback and look forward to hearing from you on our email : maisoncfontaine@gmail.com.

A HUGE thank you for your help.