This is the Église Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul in Pléneuf-Val-André, France
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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This is actually not uncommon.
Churches are often in good locations for mobile coverage.
They're connected to God already
I always love these well camouflaged ones:
There's one in my home town with about one tenth of the effort made to camouflage it in the same way. That one's not even next to any trees.
I'm not religious, but it seems like a fair deal. The phone companies like to install their antennae on tall towers, they usually make them or have them made by contractors, I suppose. Having them affixed to an existing structure just makes sense. It doesn't particularly matter that it's a church, except the phone companies whose networks are served by those antennae (which I admit I can't see in the photo) would be paying the owner of the building/land, and we left-leaning folks generally don't like money flowing into churches and whatnot, but it still makes good business sense. Tall buildings come with costs, and if those can be mitigated by leasing the height to cell phone companies, I don't see a problem. It's not like the church is censoring (or even monitoring) cellular communications routed through those antennae. Most likely they don't even have access to the data.
which I admit I can't see in the photo
Nah, that's a dual exhaust.
Thanks. Seeing the writes helped. They blend in well.
I don't think that there's a problem with private money flowing into churches. It's the public money and lack of tax payment that ikrs me, personally.
One of my hobbies as a stupid young man was breaking into roof spaces connected to my city's skywalk system, which I lived in.
You would be surprised how many buildings have these inside them, where you can't see them at all. If it's too difficult to get them rooftop or there's a code against them, or they don't want residents complaining about 5G in their buttholes, they just go inside the elevator room or somewhere tucked away.
If they are built inside the building does that not severly reduce their usability? Especially in the case of 5G?
They look a helluva lot better than those fake trees I see a lot of. One of those in my front yard.
Église Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul in Pléneuf-Val-André
Well that's a fucking mouthful!
Sometimes I expect people make up these names just to make it impossible for non-native speakers to get by.
Like how the only way to know whether any given Danish definite noun has an "et" or "en" suffix is to know already.
Holy shit, finally, a use for this skyline clutter. A normal tower would cost less to maintain though.
A normal tower would also cost more to put up than it would to rent out the church spire.
Exactly why I mentioned maintenance costs, somebody's still paying to keep the church from falling apart. Also don't see too many stories in the news about radio towers providing a sanctuary for child molesters so they've got that advantage over churches too.
I think that almost everyone's point of view (including mine) in this situation is "it's already there, it's the height we need, why not use it?"
Your last point, while true, was entirely unrelated to the discussion so I'm not sure why you felt the need to bring that up.
Because it's a downside of churches that doesn't come with radio towers. Something to consider while evaluating pros and cons.
I think from all the stuff that makes a skyline look awful, I feel that a beautiful Gothic style church is not one of them.