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Origin and history

The church of Sainte-Marguerite de Nabilles is an abandoned Romanesque church located in Conat, in the Pyrénées-Orientales. It stands on a ridge at an altitude of about 850 metres, opposite the Canigou massif, one kilometre north of the village. Its architecture combines granite and shale, with a single vaulted nave in cross of warheads and a semicircular apse covered with a quarter-sphere vault. A bell tower with two bays and a carved stone representing a snake (perhaps the dragon of Saint Marguerite) complete its exterior appearance.

The first written mention of Nabilles and his church dates back to 1265, in a document listing the possessions of the monastery of Santa Maria de Marcevol. The place could have been an independent parish including the disappeared hamlets of Nabilles and Arlates, now reduced to ruins. The building, stylistically dated from the late 12th or early 13th century, would thus have served as a parish church before its attachment to Conat.

The church illustrates the late Romanesque religious architecture of the region, marked by the use of carefully carved local materials and symbolic elements such as the representation of the dragon, an iconographic attribute of Saint Marguerite. Its present state of decommissioning and its isolation make it a preserved testimony of the small medieval parishes of the Catalan Pyrenees, now disappeared.

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