Maquis de Durestal

This walking tour through the woods allows, with the help of informative panels and a few reconstructions, to get an idea of what the life of a Perigourdian maquis was like in the years 1943-44.

In this maquis, stayed (among others) André Malraux, for two days at the end of May 1944. He was impressed by the number of resistance fighters present, to the point of evoking "a sort of city in the woods" . Here was also born the group "Ancel", future battalion "Strasbourg" of the Alsace-Lorraine brigade that André Malraux had the honor to command.

This "Chemin de la Mémoire" was inaugurated in 2013, after 3 years of meticulous reconstruction work led by the Departmental Center for the Memory of the Dordogne and its president Jean-Paul Bedoin assisted by the Association "La mémoire de our Fathers", from the General Council, from the municipality of Cendrieux, from the former community of communes of the Pays Vernois. It owes a lot to the work of Rémy Bousquet and Fernand Sabouret, who knew the site of the liberation and invested themselves without reserve in the project.

It includes a memory trail, dotted with informative panels and, at the very place of its origin, a heart of scrub reconstructed according to historical evidence : strip huts : dormitory, kitchen, ammunition compartment and even prison. Authentic, the graves dug for the traitors shot on the spot give the whole a striking reality.