BEST TRAVELER'S CHOICE 2026
BEST TRAVELER'S CHOICE 2026
Stories, guides and addresses from the Périgord Noir, written from Sarlat by Susan and Stephen.
There is no formal “École du Périgord” the way there is a Barbizon school or a Pont-Aven school; no single movement to which the art history books point. And yet painters, filmmakers and photographers have been quietly drawn to this particular light for over 100 years, and the region has not stopped attracting them since.
From the windows of Les Cordeliers, our boutique hotel in the heart of Sarlat, you are within a short walk or drive of nearly everywhere on this page, most of it best seen at the hours everyone else has gone in for lunch.
Sarlat-la-Canéda draws up to two million visitors a year into a medieval old town you can walk end to end in fifteen minutes. Lanterns hang over honey-stone façades, the Saturday market spills across three squares, and by July the narrow streets hum from breakfast until dark. It is one of the most beautiful towns in France and, for a few months each summer, one of the busiest.
Most places to stay in Sarlat respond to that energy by amplifying it: more beds per room, more guests per square meter, more profit per season. Under Stephen and Susan’s ownership, Les Cordeliers does the opposite.
St. Denis does not appear on any map of France. But nearly everything in it does. For close to twenty books now, Martin Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police novels have sent readers looking for a village that turns out to be scattered across half a dozen real ones: a market town assembled, with real affection, from the Périgord Walker has called home for more than twenty-five years.
From the windows of Les Cordeliers, our boutique hotel in the heart of Sarlat, guests are inside the world the books describe rather than reading about it from a distance. Here is where fiction and the real Périgord meet.
