Folk legend has it that the relics of Sainte Livrade (Occitan: Santa Liurada), a female martyr, were taken from the village to the historic Spanish city of Sigüenza. As Santa Librada she has been used as a symbol of female emancipation in South America.

Whatever that story, the location has been occupied since the Iron Age, the village of Sainte-Livrade d’Olt dates to the Gallo-Roman period and it was created as a Bastide in 1289. The current name, Sainte-Livrade-sur-Lot dates to 1919.

Sainte-Livrade was subject to the vicissitudes of the Cathar, Hundred Years and Religious wars over many centuries. The Tour du Roy is the last vestige of the fortifications erected by Richard Cour de Lion (the Lionheart) and finally demolished in 1793. 

The town experienced waves of immigration during the C20th. Firstly, Italian and then Spanish people fled the persecutions of the Mussolini and Franco fascist regimes of the 1920s and 1930s.

After the Indochina war and defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when Vietnam won independence from France, numbers of Vietnamese soldiers who had fought for the French were repatriated to France, most especially to a camp outside Sainte-Livrade that accommodated some 1,500 people. The camp has been greatly improved in recent years and now features a popular grocery store and a Buddhist temple.

Vietnamese émigrés were later joined by ‘Pieds-Noirs’ leaving the former French colony of Algeria after 1962, and more recently, immigrants from the wider North Africa.

In the Sainte-Livrade locality . . .