Valère Castle

The Diocese of Sion had shifted its cathedral seat from Octodurum (Martigny) to Sion in 589, after Bishop Heliodorus judged the lower town too exposed to flooding from the Rhône and the Drance. In the late tenth century Rudolph III, the last King of Upper Burgundy, granted the County of Valais to Bishop Hugo, who held the see between 998 and 1017. The grant fused spiritual and secular authority in one office, making the Prince-Bishops of Sion the most powerful nobles in the upper Rhône valley. On the hill above the town, Valère became the residence of the cathedral chapter, while the Prince-Bishop himself governed from Tourbillon Castle on the opposite hill. The name Valère is first recorded in 1049, naming it as the seat of that chapter.

The earliest parts of the church were raised between 1100 and 1130 in the Romanesque style. A second building campaign, begun after 1130, added the semicircular apse, the walls, the windows and a roof. A third phase carried the building into the new Gothic idiom: between 1235 and 1267 the nave was extended and flanked with two side aisles, the choir was covered with a ribbed vault, and a rood screen was installed to separate the chancel from the nave.

Around 1430–1435 a pipe organ was installed on the west side of the church, probably brought there by Guillaume de Rarogne, who later became bishop of Sion. Its pipes are arranged to suggest the outline of a church, the largest forming two towers and the smaller ones a triangular roof; murals in the building date from the same years, and a Gothic marble statue of the Madonna and Child was placed over the high altar in the 15th century. Choir stalls were added in the mid-17th century, and in the 1700s the organ was modified to play Baroque music, otherwise remaining essentially as built — believed to date to 1435, it is among the oldest organs in the world still in playing condition.

The organ fell silent before being restored in 1954 by the Kuhn workshop, which returned it to use. The church was raised to the rank of minor basilica during a visit by Pope John Paul II, dated 7 October 1987 in some accounts and 1984 in others. A further restoration of the organ followed in 2004, carried out by the Füglister workshop of Sion, which lowered its pitch to around 450 Hz — a quarter-tone above modern concert pitch, so that it can now be played alongside other instruments only with difficulty. Valère's canons occupied the site until the French Revolution; their former lodgings now house the History Museum of Valais, founded in 1883 and rebuilt from 2008. A restoration campaign covering the whole site has run since 1987, its fifth stage approved by the Valais parliament in March 2015 and begun in 2016. Valère is registered as a class A Swiss cultural property of national significance, and the basilica remains in use as a Roman Catholic church, open to visitors and host to an annual festival of early organ and early music.