Abbatiale de l'Oelenberg

The abbey church of Notre-Dame d'Oelenberg belonged to one of Alsace's oldest spiritual communities, founded in 1045 in the village of Reiningue near Mulhouse. The Trappist monks who shaped it for centuries also shared the site with a Trappistine community between 1825 and 1895. On 8 June 2024, the last monks left the abbey, ending nearly a thousand years of unbroken monastic life on the site. The baroque church and its cluster of monastery buildings now stand in the rolling Alsatian countryside as a protected historic monument — intact in structure but emptied of the community that gave it purpose. Visitors encounter a rare and quietly unsettling stillness.