LThe announcement, during the Municipal Council meeting on December 5, 2024, had the effect of a bomb. While a deliberation was voted for emergency work on the Notre-Dame de Dax cathedral estimated at nearly 60,000 euros, Alexis Arras, deputy mayor in charge of town planning, communicated the expert's report who examined the religious building, in a degraded state. The total cost of the renovation work is estimated at 23.9 million euros.
“Honestly, neither the mayor, nor me, nor the town planning department thought that the cost of the work would be so high. It was truly a very bad surprise,” confided the elected official a few days later. “The situation of Dax Cathedral is a bit like the cultural heritage in France, we are not the only municipality concerned. It is also the logical consequence of the fact that there has never been a real structured strategy for the maintenance of Dax Cathedral. There has been work in the past, but never anything thought of,” argues the deputy mayor.
One year of observation
“Masonry, broken glazing and tiles, deformation of the framework, development of plants”: the list of “disturbances” at Dax Cathedral is substantial, for a project which promises to be particularly complex to carry out and finance.
“It was truly a very unpleasant surprise”
“Such a project is not done in one go: firstly, it is a very heavy project technically; secondly, we must act according to the availability of credits and partners. It will be necessary to negotiate with the Drac (Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs), the Department and the Region, to see how the construction site is sequenced. It will take a particularly long negotiation time, knowing that we are in a constrained budgetary context. We are not the only ones to apply for this type of funding, so we can reasonably think that even a decade for the renovation of the cathedral is a very optimistic time frame. It will probably be much longer,” warns Alexis Arras.
“I think that we will not be able to undertake a first major phase of work between now and the end of the mandate,” adds the deputy mayor. Especially since in parallel with the emergency work which will be carried out in 2025 on the roof in particular, additional studies will be carried out.
A net was placed under the dome to prevent stones from falling on people.
Isabelle Louvier / SO
“We installed instruments to check if the cracks are evolving or if they are quite fixed. We also have an observation period of one year because we realized that inconveniences inside the cathedral could be linked to the heating. Temperature variations could contribute to the alteration of interior decorations,” explains Alexis Arras, who believes that after this year of observation, “we will really have a good idea of the diagnosis.”
Father Marchal knows that the project will take time and that it will require “constant adaptation” for a “beautiful result”, and that the Dax cathedral will rediscover “the beauty of its light stone”, which is “today very gray and damaged.
Isabelle Louvier / SO
The walls of Dax Cathedral are very dull and gray today.
