Villages in the wine growing plain

There are records of the villa of Plaxano (Plaissan) from the 9th century, a period when the village, whose name suggests a Gallo-Roman estate, seems to have been part of a dispersed settlement made up of farmsteads.

The church of Saint-Pierre has a very unusual history, since it moved location thee times. The last of these, in the faubourg, dates from 1875. It is in a neo-Romanesque style and is the work of the architect Margouires.

The village, which is a regular rectangle in shape, does not appear to have been fortified before the 14th century.

There is a surviving gateway, known as ‘Le Portalet’ which is simply an opening in the curtain wall and is today incorporated in the houses built up against the walls when the ramparts came under feudal vassalage. A fine dwelling, known as the ‘château’ was built to overlook the site at the end of the 18th century and may have been the successor to a baronial residence. It was the great upsurge in wine-growing in the 19th century that was partly responsible for the buildings outside the walls and that restored to the village its ancestral rural traditions.


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