The country of Mauriac is fortunate to still have four bread ovens in very good condition. Witnesses to a bygone past of peasant life when everyone baked their own bread. “In the Middle Ages, these ovens already existed. The peasants had to pay a tax to bake their bread”, explains Cathy Chambon, director of the Mauriac tourist office.
A page of the history of the region that the application Legend allows today to discover. By downloading it, visitors can easily find these bread ovens thanks to the geolocation system. This application tells, using images, text and videos, the history of bread from antiquity to the present day. It also gives details on the architecture of these ovens. Information to discover in situ or from his sofa. For those who are on site, the application offers an immersion in the past of these works. For this, the tourist office provides virtual reality headsets.
The application Legend was designed by the start-up Rendr, specializing in historical and heritage reconstruction. “There is a lot of heritage in France which is unexplored by the public and therefore our mission is to make it accessible”, explains Laurent Lefebvre, founder of the Rendr company. Legend covers around fifty destinations in France and Europe. It is in a way a tourist guide with suggested routes. The app brings history back to life with fully reconstructed missing sites. A real challenge which requires numerous historical documents. “Sometimes, we will have fairly precise plans, engravings, postcards. We accumulate all the information that is available. And then obviously, there is a dark side in the reconstructions so we have to make assumptions”, reports Laurent Lefebvre.
The city of Mauriac is used to the application Legend. She has already called on the services of the company Rendr in 2018 to go back in time. A trip in 3D, through the streets and historic sites of the town, through three periods: the Gallo-Roman, medieval and 19th century. The idea, “it is to show what exists in order to attract the tourists who will come to our territory”, explains Claire Vivien, director of the community of communes of the Pays de Mauriac. Chance or not, the tourist season in the country of Mauriac was exceptional in 2020.