Museums - Musée Fenaille

The museum was created over 170 years ago by the Société des Lettres, Sciences et Arts of Aveyron, and built thanks to the generosity of over 1,000 donors. It reopened in the summer of 2002 after undergoing extensive renovation. It houses an important curiosity cabinet, as well as the most important collection in France of stone monoliths from Aveyron. The famous Dame de Saint-Sernin is among the museum's most important objects. The scientific community has long been, and remains, uncertain of the precise date of origin of these steles because of the absence of an effective means of placing them in an archaeological context. It is nonetheless known that the nineteen carved monoliths displayed to the public were sculpted towards the end of the Neolithic, between 3,500 and 2,200 years ago. They appear to be the first monumental anthropomorphic representations known from the Western world.