France Guide
Burgundy
Hôtel-Dieu
Opening time: Daily: April to mid-Nov 9am–6.30pm; mid-Nov to March 9–11.30am & 2–5.30pm
Price: €6
Beaune's town centre is a tightly clustered, rampart-enclosed vieille ville, and its chief attraction is the fifteenth-century hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, on the corner of place de la Halle. The cobbled courtyard is 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, with the original heavy, enclosed wooden beds. Passing through two smaller, furnished wards, one with some stunning seventeenth-century frescos, then 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.