Some cities are visited for a single monument. Reims is one of them, and the monument is so big it risks making you miss everything else.
I arrived thinking about champagne. I left thinking about a stone gargoyle with molten lead still stuck in its beak, which is possibly the most striking object I have seen in a French museum. We’ll get there.
Because Reims is not just the “capital” of champagne: it is the city where for almost a thousand years the kings of France were crowned, and it is also one of the most wounded cities in Europe, flattened during the First World War and then rebuilt.
Do you want to know where the kings of France were crowned?
Right here.
Today Reims has four monuments on the UNESCO World Heritage list (since 1991): Notre-Dame cathedral, the Palais du Tau, the basilica of Saint-Remi and the Saint-Remi museum. And since 2015 a fifth one has been added, underground, which I’ll tell you about at the end.
In this post I’ll tell you what to see in Reims in one day, with an honest disclaimer: I spent half a day there and it was not enough.
Let’s go!
1 – Notre-Dame cathedral, where kings were made
You reach the square and the first thing you feel is very small.
Notre-Dame cathedral in Reims is 149 metres long with a nave 38 metres high, but the number that says everything is another one: its decoration counts around 2,300 statues. It is a mountain of carved stone, and the façade is so crowded that after a while you stop trying to read it and simply look.
The cathedral you see is not the first. A fire in 1210 destroyed the previous building, and the foundation stone of this one was laid on 6 May 1211 by archbishop Albéric (or Aubry) de Humbert. The Gothic forms reach their peak in the three splayed portals of the façade; turning to look inwards, the west wall is covered with reliefs of scenes from the life of Christ, which is extremely rare.
But why the kings here?
Because of a baptism, not convenience. Around 496 (the sources hover between 496 and 499) the king of the Franks, Clovis, was baptised in Reims by Saint Remigius, bringing his whole people to Christianity with him. From that gesture the city derived, for centuries, the right to consecrate the sovereigns: thirty-three kings were crowned here, with only a few exceptions among the Capetians.
The most famous is the coronation of 1429, when Charles VII was crowned with Joan of Arc present in the church. It was not just any religious ceremony: it was the act that made a contested king legitimate, in the middle of the conflict with the English.
Then look, on the left-hand portal, for the Ange au Sourire, the smiling angel: it has become the symbol of the city, and you will understand why when we get to 1914.
2 – The lost labyrinth and the four masters
Here is something you cannot see, and which I think is worth telling you precisely for that reason.
Like the other great Gothic cathedrals of the north, those of Amiens and Chartres, Reims too had a labyrinth inlaid in the floor of the central nave. Its own, though, was different from all the others: instead of purely geometric patterns, it carried the figures of the four master builders who had succeeded one another on the site.
Those are the names we know thanks to those inscriptions: Jean d’Orbais, Jean-le-Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons, with at the centre the archbishop who had begun the works.
The labyrinth disappeared in 1778, destroyed because worshippers kept walking it and disturbing the services. We know it only from seventeenth-century drawings. I find it one of the saddest losses in French architecture: a medieval building site that had signed itself, wiped out over a matter of crowd control.
3 – 1914, the day the gargoyles vomited lead
This is the part you do not expect from a guide about champagne.
Many medieval parts of the cathedral have been lost. The church was sacked during the French Revolution, because it was so deeply tied to the monarchy. But the real blow came on 19 September 1914: on that single day the cathedral was hit by twenty-five shells from German artillery. The scaffolding of the restoration works caught fire, the blaze spread to the roof and the lead covering melted.
The liquid lead looked for the only way out that Gothic architecture offered it: the throats of the waterspouts. The gargoyles literally vomited molten metal.
It is not a figure of speech, and this is where that object comes back: in the cathedral museum one of those waterspouts is on display, with the solidified lead still stuck in its channel and poured down from its beak. Five centuries of stone and a 1914 metal flow, together, motionless.
Over the whole war the cathedral was hit by roughly 288 shells. Much of the sculptural cycles and the last medieval stained glass that had survived the centuries were destroyed in those months. The Ange au Sourire was beheaded too: the head was found among the rubble and only put back in 1926.
4 – The windows: from the Middle Ages to Chagall
After the destruction of the war the stained glass had to be largely replaced, and that has turned Reims into a very strange and wonderful place: a thirteenth-century cathedral that is also a museum of contemporary stained glass.
The most famous piece is the three windows by Marc Chagall in the axial chapel, from 1974, technically executed by the master glazier Charles Marq of the Reims workshop Simon-Marq. The themes are stitched onto the history of the place: the Tree of Jesse, the sacrifice of Isaac and, in the third, entirely local episodes, the baptism of Clovis, Saint Louis dispensing justice, the coronation of Charles VII.
That blue is something you have to see in person. Photographs do not hold it.
But do not stop there, because the conversation continued: Brigitte Simon in 1981, and above all Imi Knoebel, who signed two interventions. In 2011 the windows on either side of Chagall’s (called in to answer with the colour that Chagall’s blue lacked) and in 2015 those of the Joan of Arc chapel: 5,402 pieces of glass across 64 square metres, completely abstract.
An old lady of stone, so wounded in her pride, ending up hosting something so modern. And it works.
5 – The Porte de Mars, the widest arch in the Roman world
Ten minutes’ walk from the cathedral there is a monument almost nobody puts on their list, and it holds an absolute record.
The Porte de Mars is a triumphal arch from the first half of the 3rd century: 32 metres long by 13 high, with three great openings. It is the widest arch of the Roman world to have come down to us, and that tells you everything about the importance of the city that built it.
Because Reims was called Durocortorum and was the capital of Gallia Belgica: the Remi tribe had chosen alliance with Caesar during the Gallic war, and the city was rewarded for it for centuries. The Porte de Mars is the only survivor of the city’s four monumental gates.
Look up, under the vault: the coffered decoration is still legible, eroded but legible, and among the friezes you can make out the legend of Romulus and Remus. The name, as you’d imagine, comes from a temple to Mars that once stood nearby.
6 – The basilica of Saint-Remi
If the cathedral is the Gothic that crushes you, the basilica of Saint-Remi is the Romanesque that calms you down. It is worth the fifteen-minute walk from the centre (or a tram ride).
It is the church that holds the relics of Saint Remigius, the bishop who baptised Clovis, and for that reason it is one of the four UNESCO monuments in the city. The nave is eleventh-century Romanesque, the choir is already Gothic: inside, you read a building site that went on for centuries.
At the centre of the choir stands the tomb-monument of Saint Remigius. Do not be fooled by its ancient air: the present structure is an 1847 reconstruction, replacing the Renaissance mausoleum destroyed during the Revolution. Next door, in the former abbey, is the Saint-Remi museum, the fourth UNESCO site, devoted to the archaeology and history of the city.
7 – The Palais du Tau, Charlemagne’s talisman (but watch out)
The Palais du Tau is the archbishop’s palace next to the cathedral: here the king dressed and prepared for the ceremony, and here the banquet was held afterwards. The present structure is fifteenth to eighteenth century, and it houses the cathedral treasure along with the original statues removed from the façade to protect them.
The piece you will remember is tiny: the talisman of Charlemagne, a 9th-century gold pendant with filigree, a sapphire, garnets, emeralds and pearls. It sits in a case, it is the size of a walnut, and it has crossed a thousand years of French history.
⚠️ But here I have to give you the news that changes your plans: the Palais du Tau is closed for works. It is becoming the new Musée des Sacres, the museum of coronations, and as I update this post (July 2026) the reopening forecasts point to winter 2026-2027. If you have read older guides recommending it, those guides are stuck in 2021.
Let me add the second blow, so you don’t waste time: the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Reims (the one with Cranach the Younger, David, Corot, Poussin) has been closed since September 2019 for a renovation and extension project entrusted to the Portuguese studio Aires Mateus, and it will not reopen before 2027. When it does, it will have 3,800 square metres of exhibition space, three times what it had. Note it down for a return trip, not for now.
The good news is that the cathedral towers remain open.
8 – The Museum of the Surrender: where the war in Europe ended
This is the place nobody expects in Reims, and for me it is unmissable.
In a school building in the city, on 7 May 1945 at 2:41 in the morning, the act of capitulation of Nazi Germany was signed. The room was the map room of Eisenhower’s headquarters, the so-called War Room, papered with operational charts.
That room is still there, with the original maps on the walls, inside the Musée de la Reddition (Museum of the Surrender), opened by the city in 1985 for the fortieth anniversary, in part of what is now the Franklin-Roosevelt high school.
It is a small, silent room, and the effect is strong precisely because of that: there is no staging at all, just the table where the Second World War ended in Europe.
9 – The crayères: the champagne is under your feet
And now the champagne, which in Reims is not a souvenir but a piece of archaeology.
Thirty metres beneath the city run kilometres of galleries shaped like inverted pyramids: these are the crayères, the chalk quarries dug by the Romans two thousand years ago to extract building material. In the 18th century somebody realised that those abandoned pits had a stable temperature and constant humidity, which are exactly the conditions for ageing wine.
Today the great houses use them as cellars, and they have been nicknamed “underground cathedrals”. The six houses that occupy them on the Saint-Nicaise hill are Charles-Heidsieck, Ruinart, Veuve Clicquot, Martel, Taittinger and Pommery.
In July 2015 UNESCO inscribed “Coteaux, Maisons et Caves de Champagne” on the World Heritage list, as a living cultural landscape. It is the fifth UNESCO site in Reims, the one you cannot see from outside.
One important practical note: you don’t visit the houses by walking in off the street, you book. If you want to put more than one together without organising the transfers yourself, here you can find the cellar tour with tastings. It is the only thing in Reims I would really tell you to spend on: the monuments are almost all free, the cellars are not and they need booking.
What to eat in Reims: the pink biscuits
Do not leave Reims without the biscuits roses, the pink biscuits. They are dry, light, faintly vanilla-scented, and they were designed to be dipped in champagne without crumbling (that is why they are so hard: the flaw is deliberate).
The recipe goes back to 1691, and they are made by Maison Fossier, founded in 1756, the oldest biscuit factory in France. In 1775 its biscuits were served at the coronation of Louis XVI right here in Reims, and the house became a supplier to the king.
Buy a box. It survives the journey and it explains the pink.
Practical information for visiting Reims
Getting there. Reims is about 45 minutes by TGV from Paris (Gare de l’Est): one of the easiest day trips in France. The station is a ten-minute walk from the cathedral, so a car is completely useless if you are staying in the city.
How long you need. The centre is walkable. Half a day gets you the cathedral and the Porte de Mars; a full day adds Saint-Remi, the Museum of the Surrender and one cellar. If you want two champagne houses, sleep there.
The cathedral. Entrance is free. What you pay for is the climb up the towers, managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux: 249 steps, accompanied visit, ticket from 9 €, with online booking recommended. In high season (early May to early September) departures run every day except Monday and Sunday morning, around 10, 11, 14, 15 and 16. Always check before you go, because the times change from season to season.
What is closed right now (July 2026). Palais du Tau (reopening expected winter 2026-2027 as the Musée des Sacres) and Musée des Beaux-Arts (not before 2027). Open and visitable: cathedral, towers, Saint-Remi basilica and museum, Museum of the Surrender, Porte de Mars, cellars by reservation.
When to go. Spring and September are the best time, not least because the Champagne harvest falls between late August and September. I went in the depth of winter, with low light on the towers, and I can tell you it works beautifully that way too.
Reims is the natural starting point for the old Champagne region and for the Gothic of northern France. A short hop away you have Troyes with its half-timbered houses and Provins, the town of the medieval fairs. And if the cathedrals have got you, the route continues with Amiens, the abbey of Soissons and Rouen. I have lined them all up, with the real train times from Paris, in the guide to what to see in France beyond Paris.
And you, would you go to Reims for the cathedral or for the bubbles?
