| BEAUNE, the principal town of the Côte d'Or, just about manages to maintain it's attractively ancient air, despite a near constant stream of tourists and rampant commercialism – this must be one of the few towns in France where most of the shops stay open at lunchtime. Narrow cobbled streets and sunny squares dotted with cafés make it a lovely spot to sample the region's wine, though you may find it cheaper and easier to use Dijon as a base for getting around in the area, as there are good connections by train and Transco buses, which service all the villages down the N74. Searching for a Beaune hotel, this website has a lot of choise. Beaune's town centre is a tightly clustered, rampart-enclosed vieille ville, and its chief attraction is the fifteenth-century hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu (April–Nov 9am–6.30pm; Dec–March daily except Tues 9.30am–5pm; €5.10), on the corner of place de la Halle. Once past the turnstile you find yourself in a cobbled courtyard surrounded by a wooden gallery overhung by a massive roof patterned with diamonds of gaudy tiles – green, burnt sienna, black and yellow – and similarly multicoloured steep-pitched dormers and turrets. Inside is a vast paved hall with a glorious arched timber roof, the Grande Salle des Malades, which preserves the heavy, enclosed wooden beds used in the nineteenth century and beyond – patients were accommodated here up until 1971. Passing through two smaller, furnished wards, the kitchen and the pharmacy, you reach a dark chamber housing the splendid fifteenth-century altarpiece of the Last Judgement by Rogier van der Weyden. The painting was commissioned by Nicolas Rolin, who also founded the hospital in 1443 (King Louis XI commented: "It was only fair that a man who had made so many people poor during his life should create an asylum for them before his death"). A major wine auction takes place here during the annual Trois Glorieuses festival, the prices paid setting the pattern for the season. The private residence of the dukes of Burgundy on rue d'Enfer now contains the Musée du Vin (daily 9.30am–6pm; winter daily except Tues 9.30am–5pm; €5.10, same ticket allows entry to the two fine arts museums listed below), with giant winepresses, a collection of traditional tools of the trade and a relief map of the vineyards that begins to make sense of it all. At the other end of rue d'Enfer – one of Beaune's quieter, lovelier cobbled streets – is the Burgundian Romanesque church of Notre-Dame. Inside are five very special Tournai tapestries from the fifteenth century, depicting the life of the Virgin and commissioned, once again, by the Rolin family. There are two other museums in town: the not-very-interesting Musée des Beaux-Arts, in the Porte Marie de Bourgogne, and the Musée Marey, devoted to early movie photography, which is housed in the town hall until it moves to the Porte Marie de Bourgogne in 2004 (both April–Oct daily 2–6pm; same ticket as wine museum). On the outskirts of the town, by the A6 Beaune–Tailly–Merceuil rest area, there's an open-air park called the Archéodrome (April–June & Sept daily 10am–6pm; July & Aug daily 10am–7pm; Feb, March & Oct–Dec Wed–Sun 10am–5pm; adults €6.10, children €4.30), illustrating the history of Burgundy, with film and reconstructions of a Neolithic house, Caesar's siege of Alésia, a farm with ancient breeds of farm animals and so on.
Pages in section ‘Beaune’: Practicalities.
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