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Wise Pilgrim APPLarreule was once home to one of the three most important abbeys in Bearn, founded at the end of the 10th century by Guillaume Sanche, Duke of Gascony, and Centule III, Viscount of Bearn. The name derives from "Regula" (the rule) -- the Benedictine rule the monks followed. The bastide grew at the foot of the abbey in the late 13th century.
Montgomery's Protestant forces devastated the abbey in 1569 -- part of the same August sweep that destroyed nearly every major religious building on this stretch. By the 18th century only two monks remained, and the Revolution finished the job. What survives is the Eglise Saint-Pierre, the abbey's 12th-century church, now the only vestige of what was once a major monastic center.
