In the 14th century, the 15th century Dijon was the capital of the Duke of Burgundy, which controlled a large area of eastern France, the Netherlands, the Flanders, and Luxembourg.
The sumptuous home of the Dukes of Burgundy is still in place and is now a superb art museum as well as the city’s Hôtel de Ville. In the stylish old center, you’ll have fun discovering Dijon’s history with the Parcours de la Chouette trail, which labels 22 sights with the city’s iconic owl motif. This being Burgundy, the cuisine is out of this world but also very familiar: Think beef bourguignon, coq au vin, onion soup, and match all that with some of France’s most distinguished wine. Let's explore the best things to do in Dijon.
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1. Ducal Palace
At Place de la Libération you’re greeted by the home of the Dukes of Burgundy in the 14th and 15th centuries, now the town hall.
If it doesn’t look like it’s from this time that’s because the building has been in use by the city ever since, and was extended in the 17th century by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who was responsible for the Grand Trianon at Versailles.
He also designed Place de la Liberation, and if you look between two classic portraits, you can see Philip the Good's Renaissance Tower poked in the middle. This is the oldest part of the building visible from the square and dates to the 1450s.
If you’re up for climbing more than 300 steps you’ll have the ultimate view of Dijon as your reward.
2. Musée des Beaux-Arts
Also inside the Ducal Palace in Dijon’s Fine Arts Museum, which was founded in 1787 and conveys the wealth and opulence of the Dukes of Burgundy. This is clearest in the tombs of John the Fearless and Philip the Bold, with their masterful early-renaissance alabaster sculptures.
Down the year's many wealthy benefactors have donated their collections to the museum, so you can see Islamic weapons and glassware, Oriental porcelain, African ceremonial mask, Ancient Egyptian antiquities and Roman art from Switzerland and Germany.
In the supreme painting galleries, you’ll contemplate old masters like Titian, Lorenzo Lotto, Breughel the Elder, and Rubens, as well as 19th-century art from Monet, Manet, Sisley, and Géricault.
3. Parcours de la Chouette
On the north side of the Church of Notre-Dame is Dijon’s symbolic owl, sculpted in the 1500s. The stone has been buffed shiny by centuries of people touching it for good luck and making a wish.
Strictly you should do this with your left hand when you pass it on your left-hand side, or your wish won’t come true. The owl is the inspiration for a 22-stop tour around the historic center, with each sight labeled by a brass waymarker with the cute owl motif.
Get a trail guide from the tourist office and the walk will take an hour or so; ideal for a whirlwind tour of the city. If you want to go at your own pace you’ll make it a leisurely afternoon calling in at shops and pausing at cafe terraces on your way. There are three loops within the trail: Moses, Rousseau, and Zola.
4. Musée de la Vie Bourguignonne
With a lovely home in the cloister of a 17th-century Bernardine Cistercian monastery, this ethnographic museum presents rural life and city life in Burgundy from the 1700s to the start of the 1900s.
On the ground floor there a general ethnographic collection from the 19th century, with regional costume, furniture, household tools, and decorations.
The first floor is a little more exciting, with ten tableaus representing traditional trades in the region, with hatters, grocers, butchers and barbers, and the real tools they used in the 1800s and 1900s.
And if you want to know more about the history of Dijon mustard, the museum relays all the background on this condiment.
5. Rue des Forges
From Place François-Rude to Rue Verrerie, Rue des Forges is in the city’s conservation area and is both a favored shopping artery and a way to admire some of the city’s most handsome old buildings.
Wedged between the posh boutiques are mansions belonging to distinguished inhabitants from Dijon’s history. For example, on 52-56, here, Hôtel Hôtel Morel-Sauvegrain, was once the home of nurse Charles the Bold, former Duke of Burgundy.
But at 34-36 is the highlight, at Hôtel Chambellan you can go through the decorative gate to the courtyard to see a fabulous carved wooden gallery and a stone spiral staircase, dating from the 15th to the 17th centuries.
6. Musée Magnin
From the end of the 1800s to the 1930s, the wealthy Parisian magistrate Maurice Magnin and his sister Jeanne amassed around 2,000 pieces of art, which they bequeathed to the city, along with their 17th-century hôtel particulier.
They had spent decades at auctions buying art they admired, whether or not a famous name had created it. So you have a wonderful store of paintings by lesser-known French, Flemish and Italian artists.
At the core is a detailed exhibition of the French school from the 1500s to the 1800s, outstanding for its works from the 1600s by the likes of Bourdon, Laurent de La Hyre, and Eustache Le Seur.
7. Church of Notre-Dame
In the middle of the old center, this 13th-century gothic church has a design that resembles few in France. The flat western facade is most unusual of all, with a large porch made up of three arches on the lower level.
On the two levels above are rows of columns, each row bordered by a long line of gargoyles representing monsters, animals and also humans (there are 51 gargoyles in total). Step back from the western entrance and you can identify the jacquemart in the tower above.
The clockwork automatons that strike the church’s bell were looted from the city of Kortrijk by Philip the Bold in the 1380s.
8. Jardin Botanique de l’Arquebuse
The Arquebusiers were a company of soldiers that trained and lived on this site in the centuries up the late-1700s, at which time their final captain laid an English-style garden. At the start of the 19th century it was turned into a botanic garden and now has more than 4,000 plant species.
The idea is to acquaint you with all the plants that are native to the Burgundy region, while around a quarter of the species are from other parts of the world. You don’t need to have a green thumb to revel in the park and its serene arbors, pergolas, ponds and formal flower beds.
9. Museum d’Histoire Naturelle
Located in the Jardin des Sciences, the Natural History Museum is in the former barracks of the Arquebusiers, dating to 1608. The museum has been going since 1838 and was established by Leonard Nodot, a Dijon naturalist.
The ground floor relates the geology of the Burgundy region and has some thrilling fossils, such as a leg bone from a mastodon, several mollusks and the antlers of an Irish megaceros deer extinct for many thousands of years.
The upper floor combines new interactive exhibits about the natural world with a kind of 19th century “cabinet of curiosity” featuring shells, taxidermies, and butterfly collections, showing what the museum would have been like in the 1800s.
10. Dijon Cathedral
Dijon’s gothic cathedral was completed in the 15th century but has plenty of architecture that is several hundred years older. The thing to see before you go inside is that marvelous Burgundian patterned roof.
You have to pay a couple of Euros to go into the cathedral’s crypt but it’s well worth the price, as you’ll be entering the oldest part of the church. This is from the 1000s and was the underground part of an abbey built to shelter the tomb of the 4th-century Saint Benignus.
The design was intended to resemble the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
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