Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The Salagon Museum is a former priory located in Mane, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, classified as a historical monument. It includes a 12th century Romanesque church, a Renaissance home, and six hectares of ethnobotanical gardens. Labelled "Musée de France" and "remarkable garden", it highlights the relationship between the inhabitants of Haute-Provence and their plant environment, with over 1,700 plant species and 15,000 ethnographic objects.

The Salagon site reveals a continuous occupation since Neolithic. Stunned, it delivered traces of an indigenous farm, then a Gallo-Roman villa of the first century, replaced in the fifth century by a Christian basilica. In the 11th–12th century, he became a Benedictine priory dependent on the abbey of Saint-André de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. The monks reconstruct the Church of Our Lady, still visible today, and add a prioral house and a enclosure in the 13th century.

In the 15th to 16th centuries, the priory was abandoned by the monks and entrusted to a priest. In the 18th century, it served as an agricultural attic before being sold as a national good during the Revolution. Acquired by a peasant family until 1980, he was requisitioned by the Italian army during the Second World War. In 1981, the commune of Mane became its owner, and the association Alpes de Lumière, founded by Abbé Pierre Martel, created an ethnological conservatory.

Pierre Martel, parish priest of Mane, started in 1956 the preservation of the site and the collection of objects bearing witness to social life in Haute-Provence. In 1984, the departmental council of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence took over the management of the site and carried out important restoration work until 1995, accompanied by archaeological excavations. In 2000, Salagon became a departmental museum, and in 2011 the collections of Alpes de Lumière were transferred to the department.

Today, the museum offers permanent and temporary exhibitions, thematic gardens (medieval, scents, modern times) and educational activities. Recognized as an ethnopole in 1996, the institution collaborates with scientific partners to enhance its collections (objects, archives, audiovisual) and disseminates its research through digital publications, such as Les Cahiers de Salagon.

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