Palais des Papes

How to visit without leaving underwhelmed

The thing nobody warns you about the Palais des Papes is that the rooms are nearly empty. This was the seat of the popes from 1309 to 1377 and is still the largest Gothic palace in Europe, but the furniture, frescoes and gilding were stripped out after the Revolution, when the building spent the 19th century as a barracks. Walk it cold and you get a sequence of vast, bare stone halls.

What turns that around is the HistoPad, a touchscreen tablet handed to every visitor and included in the ticket price. Hold it up in the marked rooms and augmented reality rebuilds nine of the main chambers in their 14th-century colour, furniture and tapestries, with audio in seven languages. Treat it as the main event, not an add-on — it is the difference between understanding the scale of the place and trudging through cold corridors.

Buy the €17 combined ticket that covers both the palace and the Pont Saint-Bénézet — the famous half-bridge from the Sur le pont d’Avignon song, which stops mid-river where the rest washed away. It sits five minutes’ walk from the palace and the combined price is only about €2.50 more than the palace alone. You normally don’t need to book ahead; unlike the Paris blockbusters it rarely sells out, so on-the-day tickets at the entrance are fine outside the July theatre-festival crush.

Worth it, with one condition

Allow an hour and a half to two hours for the 25-room circuit, plus another half hour for the bridge. The interior is the same flat light all day, so timing matters less here than at a stained-glass church — but the courtyard and ramparts photograph best in late-afternoon Provençal sun, and a morning start beats the coach groups that arrive mid-day in summer. The palace opens 9:00 to 19:00 from March to early November and keeps shorter winter hours, with last entry an hour before closing.

It’s worth it, with a condition. If you engage with the HistoPad it’s a genuinely good two hours and the best single sight in Avignon. If you’d rather just wander empty rooms, your money goes further elsewhere in Provence. Pair it with the bridge, a coffee on Place de l’Horloge, and — if you have a half-day spare — the bus out to the Pont du Gard aqueduct, rather than stacking two heavy historical sights in one go.