The Hospices de Beaune, and its roof
A fifteenth-century charity hospital with the most photographed roof in France, and a wine auction that still funds it. What to see, and when to avoid it.
5 min read
The Hôtel-Dieu in Beaune was founded in 1443 by Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to the Duke of Burgundy, as a hospital for the poor. It worked as one until 1971.
The roof
The courtyard roof is laid in glazed terracotta tiles — gold, green, black-brown and red — in diamond patterns. It is the image on every poster of Burgundy, and it is worth the entry fee on its own.
The technique came from central Europe and spread through the duchy in the fifteenth century. You will see smaller versions on churches and town halls across the region once you start looking.
Inside
The Salle des Pôvres is the great hall: a barrel-vaulted timber ceiling, and beds ranged down both walls with red curtains. Patients could see the chapel altar from where they lay, which was the point.
At the far end, Rogier van der Weyden’s polyptych of the Last Judgement, painted for the hospital and still owned by it. It is displayed separately, under glass, with a magnifying apparatus for the detail.
The auction
The Hospices owns around sixty hectares of vineyard, given over the centuries by donors. On the third Sunday of November the wine is sold at auction, cask by cask, and the proceeds fund the modern hospital.
Prices at the sale are not a guide to the market — they are inflated by charity and publicity. But the weekend around it, the Trois Glorieuses, is the biggest event in the Burgundy calendar.
When to go
Beaune in high summer is crowded and hot, and the courtyard is a suntrap. Early morning or the hour before closing are much better.
November during the auction weekend is extraordinary and entirely impossible to find a room for. Book a year out or come at another time.
What else is inside the walls
Beaune’s old town is small enough to cross in fifteen minutes. The Collégiale Notre-Dame holds a set of fifteenth-century tapestries of the life of the Virgin, and almost nobody goes in.