The Most Beautiful Places in Burgundy-Franche-Comté
6 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Burgundy-Franche-Comté are Abbey of Fontenay, Notre Dame du Haut and Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans. The list covers 6 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Burgundy-Franche-Comté joins the old duchy of Burgundy, with its vineyards and stone villages, to the wooded limestone highlands of the Jura. In the Middle Ages this was the monastic heart of Europe: Cluny and Cîteaux, the two great reforming orders of the age, were both founded in Burgundy, and their monks covered the region with abbeys. Later, the dukes of Burgundy rivalled the kings of France in wealth and taste, and the Jura's salt and timber fed an early industry.
The Abbey of Fontenay, founded by Bernard of Clairvaux, is the best-preserved early Cistercian monastery in the world, with its church, cloister and forge set in a quiet wooded valley. At Vézelay, the Romanesque basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine crowns a hill, and its carved tympanum above the inner doorway is one of the great works of twelfth-century sculpture; Bernard preached the Second Crusade here. In Beaune, the Hospices founded in 1443 by the chancellor Nicolas Rolin still wear their famous roofs of glazed tiles in coloured patterns.
The Franche-Comté adds very different works. The Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in the 1770s, lays out factory buildings in a perfect semicircle as an ideal of rational order. At Ronchamp, Le Corbusier's chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut swells under a roof like an upturned hull. And at Baume-les-Messieurs, an abbey lies at the bottom of a reculée, a blind valley closed by cliffs and waterfalls.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Abbey of Fontenay | Monastery | ✓ |
| 2 | Notre Dame du Haut | Church building | ✓ |
| 3 | Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans | Industrial heritage site | |
| 4 | Vézelay Abbey | Monastery | ✓ |
| 5 | Hospices de Beaune | Museum | |
| 6 | Reculée de Baume-les-Messieurs | Canyon |
01 Abbey of Fontenay
Abbaye de Fontenay
France47.640° N 4.389° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by guy_dugas from Pixabay Fontenay is the Cistercian ideal almost untouched: a monastery founded by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1118 in a wooded Burgundy valley near Montbard, and still standing with nearly all of its 12th-century buildings. Bernard wanted an order stricter than Cîteaux itself, and the architecture shows it.
Did you know? From 1820 the paper mill belonged to Élie de Montgolfier, a member of the family that invented the hot-air balloon.
02 Notre Dame du Haut
Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut de Ronchamp
France47.705° N 6.621° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Immanuel Giel · CC BY-SA 3.0 On a hilltop above the small town of Ronchamp, Le Corbusier built a chapel that looks like nothing he had done before. The champion of standardisation and the machine aesthetic produced here, in 1955, a curving, almost sculptural building, its roof swelling up like a sail in the wind.
Did you know? Although the chapel was blessed on its completion in 1955, it was formally consecrated only in 2005, half a century later.
03 Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans
Saline royale d'Arc-et-Senans
France · 29.1 km from Besançon47.033° N 5.778° E
GO69 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Near the Forest of Chaux in Franche-Comté, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux built one of the strangest and most visionary industrial buildings of the eighteenth century.
Did you know? Madame du Barry backed his election to the Royal Academy of Architecture, which allowed him to style himself Royal Architect.
04 Vézelay Abbey
Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine
France · 39.6 km from Auxerre47.466° N 3.748° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Benjamin Smith · CC BY-SA 4.0 Vézelay Abbey crowns a hill in northern Burgundy, and its basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine is one of the high points of Romanesque art in Europe. From about 1050 the monks claimed to hold relics of Mary Magdalene, and the pilgrims they attracted paid for a church big enough to receive them.
Did you know? Pope Innocent II came in person in 1132 to inaugurate an enclosed porch built to hold the throngs of pilgrims.
05 Hospices de Beaune
France · 37.3 km from Dijon47.022° N 4.837° E
Image by falco from Pixabay The courtyard roofs of the Hôtel-Dieu in Beaune are what people remember: steep slopes covered in glazed tiles of red, brown, yellow and green, laid in interlocking diamond patterns and pierced by rows of dormers with carved woodwork and iron finials.
Did you know? Each curtained bed in the Great Hall was made to hold two patients, with a chest behind it for storing their clothes.
06 Reculée de Baume-les-Messieurs
France46.733° N 5.639° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the edge of the Jura plateau the ground simply stops: limestone cliffs drop up to two hundred metres into a deep, flat-bottomed valley that ends abruptly in a wall of rock, as if the river had backed itself into a corner.
Did you know? Floods sweep through the caves so regularly that few stalactites and other formations survive inside them.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Burgundy-Franche-Comté?
- On our list, Abbey of Fontenay ranks first, followed by Notre Dame du Haut and Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans.
- What is a reculée?
- A reculée is a steep-sided blind valley cut into a limestone plateau, ending in a semicircle of cliffs where a spring emerges. They are characteristic of the Jura, and Baume-les-Messieurs is one of the most famous.
- Why are the roofs of the Hospices de Beaune so colourful?
- They are covered in varnished tiles of red, brown, yellow and green laid in geometric patterns, a style associated with Burgundy and Central Europe. The tiles were a display of the founder's wealth and have been restored many times.
- Who designed the chapel at Ronchamp?
- Le Corbusier designed Notre-Dame du Haut, completed in 1955 on a hill above Ronchamp. It is part of the UNESCO listing of his architectural work.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Burgundy-Franche-Comté?
- In our collection, the places in Burgundy-Franche-Comté are most often churches (2), monasteries (2), canyons and gorges (1) and abbeys (1).
- How many places are on this list in Burgundy-Franche-Comté?
- The list covers 6 places.