Ganagobie Abbey is a Benedictine monastery in Ganagobie in the department of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France. The first monastic foundation on this remote and mountainous site appears to date from the 9th or 10th century. Among the first documentary records is a bull of Pope Stephen VIII in 939 confirming the possessions of Cluny Abbey, among them the monastery at Ganagobie. It was suppressed in 1789 under the Ancien Régime and sold off in 1791 during the course of the French Revolution, after which large parts of the buildings were demolished.
In 1865 the Benedictines of Solesmes under Dom Prosper Guéranger founded the Priory of St. Madeleine in Marseilles, or Marseilles Priory. In 1891 the Comte de Malijay, by that time the owner of the priory site at Ganagobie, made a gift of to the Marseilles Priory. In the course of repair and restoration work on the new property, important medieval mosaics were discovered in 1898.
In 1901 however the community at Marseilles were forced by the Association Laws to leave France. They took refuge in Italy and did not return until 1922, when they took up residence at Hautecombe Abbey, of which Ganagobie was from then on a priory, of one or two monks only.
In 1987, after decades of restoration work, the whole community of Hautecombe decided to move to Ganagobie, which they did in 1992.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.