Vezelay Route GR654 or Traditional?

I used the yellow Chassain guide in 2010, which is different from the GR route. I am not sure whether the Chassain guide is still available and updated. It is in French, but there is a lot of info which a non-French speaker can understand and the maps, whilst old are worth having. I bought my copy in Vezelay.

Part way along I met a fellow pilgrim who had started from his home in Holland. He was using the GR guide. He quickly changed to my route. The main reason was that the GR was convoluted and unnecessarily lengthy, unless you wanted to climb the hill and see the view. He wanted to get to Santiago, preferably using a traditional route.

The GR 654 is a hiking trail (GR means Grande Randonnée).
The route coming from the yellow Guide Chassain is the historical way, or at least as close as possible to it.
The main difference is that the GR654 is around 200 km longer.

The historical way is maintained by the "Association des Amis et Pèlerins de Saint-Jacques de la Voie de Vézelay" and the local associations.
For the practical information (including GPX routes and POI files), see the "Voie de Vézelay" site, which is regularly updated.

Buen Camino,
Jacques-D.

jdpiguet said:

The GR 654 is a hiking trail (GR means Grande Randonnée).
The route coming from the yellow Guide Chassain is the historical way, or at least as close as possible to it.
The main difference is that the GR654 is around 200 km longer.

The historical way is maintained by the "Association des Amis et Pèlerins de Saint-Jacques de la Voie de Vézelay" and the local associations.
For the practical information (including GPX routes and POI files), see the "Voie de Vézelay" site, which is regularly updated.

Buen Camino,
Jacques-D.

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Thanks!

This is good news. I thoroughly enjoyed this route, my third.

Steven B said:

Thank You, I have downloaded the gpx and poi files from the "Voie de Vézelay" site. Will now try and download a gpx of just the GR 654 so I can have them both on the same map and see the difference. I can then also switch between them, or go my own way as needed while walking.

I like the security of having the gpx tracks just to double check I am following the correct red and white markers. Also when I have not seen a mark for a while usually when I daydream past a turnoff

Click to expand...

Be careful:

• GR's are marked Red-White
• Voie de Vézelay is marked Yellow/Blue

See this link for more information.

Buen Camino, Jacques-D.

The mapy.cz app seems to be good at showing the major variants, and the GR 654 seems to diverge from the Vézelay Way proper quite significantly. And there's both a Via Lemovicensis trail and a different Voie de Vézelay one -- though they frequently converge with each other into a single trail, and with the GR too sometimes.

In spots, all three diverge anyway from what the historic route should be -- sometimes sensibly, just to take a better walking route than the tarmac, but at other times the routes do not pass through the villages/parishes but go around them -- which is a frequent annoyance on modern French hiking routes constructed around the old pilgrimage Ways. Still, it seems you already have a handle on how to deal with that.

I walked the Mont-de-Marsan > SJPP section of it on my 1994 from Paris, and at the time none of these things existed, but with some minor exceptions the waymarked route there follows the DIY route I found for myself.

It seems fairly messy between Limoges and Périgueux, one of the options even avoids Limoges entirely which seems crazy to me from any traditional perspective. And between Vézelay and Limoges you may find yourself choosing between routes and DIY on a day-to-day basis.

After Périgueux things seem to get a bit crazy, with some major divergences -- indeed one of the options seems to lead to the Le Puy route at Montréal !! IMO you'd really want to go downriver from Périgueux to Mussidan, then carry on from there via La Réole and so on.

Anyway, mapy.cz does seem to be pretty good for this route and its multiple variants.

Oh, and this old IGN map, made in the early 1990s, shows the pre-GR historic routes, though not in any detail :

https://www.ign.es/web/BibliotecaIGN/42-B-16_01.JPG

And this more recent one shows a good overview of the current variants :