Reims Beyond the Cellar Door: A Coronation Cathedral, Chagall's Blues, and a Japanese Master's Painted Chapel

Reims Beyond the Cellar Door: A Coronation Cathedral, Chagall's Blues, and a Japanese Master's Painted Chapel

Most people come to Reims for the champagne. They arrive on the 45-minute TGV from Paris Gare de l'Est, tour a cellar, drink a glass of something expensive, and leave before the city shows its other face. This is a mistake, and it is an expensive one. Reims is the coronation city of France — thirty-three kings were crowned here between 1027 and 1825, Clovis was baptised here in 496, and the Gothic cathedral that anchored it all was considered so central to French identity that German shells deliberately sought it out in 1914, and American money deliberately rebuilt it afterward. The champagne is excellent. But the history is the reason to stay.

The Coronation Cathedral: Rayonnant Gothic at Full Power

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims dominates the centre, and it earns the dominance. Entry is free. The cathedral opens daily at 7:30 AM and closes at 7:30 PM (7:15 PM on Sundays and religious holidays). On Sunday mornings mass runs 9 AM to noon and visitors are not admitted — plan around it, because Sunday mass in a coronation cathedral is not a tourist inconvenience, it is the building doing its actual job.

Construction began in 1211, after the previous cathedral burned, and the final stone was laid in 1515. The intended spires were never built, which means what you see is the Rayonnant Gothic ideal at its most confident: a west front carrying more than 2,300 sculpted figures, three portals narrating the Virgin's story from Visitation to Coronation, and a smile on the central tympanon that art historians call the "Smile of Reims" — a joviality no other great Gothic portal dares. Walk the full width of the parvis before you go in. The facade is designed to be read from left to right, like a manuscript.

Inside, the nave rises 38 metres, among the tallest of its era. The 13th-century glass in the upper registers survived the Revolution and two world wars, including the north transept rose depicting the Creation. The windows everyone photographs are newer: in 1974, at the age of eighty-seven, Marc Chagall designed three axial chapel windows in deep blues and reds — the Tree of Jesse, the great moments of the Old and New Testaments, and what he called the finest hours of Reims. They hang among medieval glass without apology, and they work. The cathedral, the Saint-Remi basilica, and the Palais du Tau together became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.

Two practical upgrades separate a good visit from a great one. First, the tower tour. Guided climbs of the towers and great gallery run from the Centre des Monuments Nationaux at 2 place du Cardinal Luçon. From February 15 to November 15 there are tours Tuesday through Saturday at 10, 11, 2, 3 and 4 PM, with an extra 5 PM slot from May 6 to September 8; Sundays have afternoon departures only. Budget €10–12 per person and book at the tourist office or on the monuments-nationaux site, especially for the English-language slots — they fill fast in summer. The payoff is the roofscape: you stand above the flying buttresses with the plain of Champagne spreading out flat on every side, and you finally understand why every army in European history wanted this city. Note that the towers close entirely from November 16 to February 14, except the Easter and Pentecost holiday Mondays.

Second, come back at night. From June through August the city projects Rêves de Couleurs, a sound-and-light show, onto the facade after dark (usually around 11 PM at midsummer, earlier in September). It is free, it is genuinely beautiful the first time, and the square fills with locals as much as tourists. If you are only in Reims one evening, this is how to spend it.

The Scars of 1914

Reims carries its worst day on the facade, if you know where to look. On September 19, 1914 — the date mattered to me when I stood there, one hundred and twelve years to the day — twenty-five German shells hit the cathedral. The roof caught fire, the lead of the vaulting melted and poured down through the interior in burning streams, and the scaffolding left up for restoration work collapsed and took stonework with it. Within weeks the cathedral had become the most photographed ruin in the world, a deliberate emblem of what German artillery did to French civilisation. The world's response was equally deliberate: donations poured in from dozens of countries, capped by one million dollars from John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1924, and the restoration continued for two decades.

Two things remain from that story. First, train your eye: on the facade you can still distinguish weathered 13th-century sculpture from the crisper, paler 20th-century replacement work. The cathedral does not hide the seam; it teaches you to see it. Second, remember what the building was chosen for afterward. On July 8, 1962, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer attended mass here together — the coronation church of the French kings, used as the stage for Franco-German reconciliation less than half a century after the shells. Pope John Paul II came in 1996 for the 1,500th anniversary of Clovis's baptism. Reims does not treat its wounds as decorations. It treats them as arguments.

Saint-Remi and the Baptism That Made France

Five hundred metres south, the Basilica of Saint-Remi is smaller, older, and — this is heresy among cathedral loyalists — the more moving building. The present structure layers Romanesque and Gothic work from the 11th to the 15th centuries, and it holds the tomb of Saint Remigius, the bishop who baptised Clovis, King of the Franks, on Christmas Day 496. That ceremony is the hinge of French history: it bound the Frankish monarchy to the Church, and it is why French kings insisted on being crowned in Reims for the next thirteen centuries. The Holy Ampulla — the vial of chrism allegedly brought by a dove for that baptism and used at every coronation — was kept in the treasury until the Revolution smashed it in 1793. Entry to the basilica is free. Go when the light is low, around 5 PM, when the glass over the choir does what Chagall only imitated.

Next door, the former royal abbey of Saint-Remi houses the Musée Saint-Remi at 53 rue Simon — seventeen rooms running Reims's story from prehistory through the Renaissance, in a building whose cloister and great staircase are exhibits in themselves. Admission is €5.50 (free for under-25s), Tuesday to Sunday 10 AM–12 PM and 2–6 PM, closed Mondays.

One correction you will need because every outdated guide gets it wrong: the Palais du Tau, the former archbishop's palace beside the cathedral where kings slept the night before their coronation, is currently closed to the public for a full transformation into the Musée des Sacres. Reopening is expected in 2027. Until then, the coronation regalia, tapestries, and the chariot that carried Charles X to his 1825 coronation are simply not on view — do not plan your day around a building you cannot enter. A temporary bookshop and information point beside the cathedral keeps the story alive in miniature; the full experience waits for the museum.

The Roman Layer

Reims was Durocortorum, one of the largest cities of Roman Gaul, and the layer is still visible if you look down as much as up. The Porte de Mars, a third-century triumphal arch at Place de la République near the station, is 33 metres wide — among the broadest Roman arches anywhere — with reliefs of Romulus and Remus, Castor and Pollux, and Leda and the Swan worked into the piers. It is free, always open, and standing on a traffic island, which means the correct visit is five unhurried minutes from all four sides, not a destination in itself. Beneath Place du Forum, a short walk from the cathedral, you can also visit the cryptoporticus, the buried remains of the Roman forum's galleries — free entry during opening hours, and quietly one of the best value stops in the city.

Down in the Chalk: The Champagne Houses

The champagne houses are why most visitors come, and they are genuinely impressive — not as marketing attractions but as industrial archaeology. The chalk cellars, or crayères, were begun by Gallo-Roman quarrymen and extended by monks and merchants over fifteen centuries. Some run 30 metres deep, holding a constant 11 degrees Celsius, which is why the wine came here to age. Bring a jacket even in July.

Five houses matter for a first visit, and they are not interchangeable. Book online a week or more ahead; summer weekends sell out.

• Taittinger, 9 place Saint-Nicaise, in the Saint-Nicaise district south of the centre. Its cellars descend from the ruins of a 13th-century abbey, Saint-Nicaise itself, and the tour route physically walks you past Roman chalk pits and monastic wall fragments. Tours from around €28 with one or two glasses. The best balance of history, price, and quality for a first cellar visit.
• Pommery, 5 place du Général Gouraud. The most theatrical entrance — 116 steps down through Elizabethan-style 19th-century architecture into cellars hung with contemporary art commissions. Standard tours from around €30. Come for the spectacle as much as the wine.
• Veuve Clicquot, 1 rue Albert Thomas. Founded 1772; the widow Clicquot invented riddling and, arguably, modern champagne marketing. From around €35 for the standard visit; higher tiers climb fast. Book furthest in advance of any house here.
• G.H. Mumm, 34 rue du Champ de Mars, closest to the station. The Cordon Rouge tour runs about €30, with Pinot Noir Celebration (€42) and Vintage Grand Cru (€60) tiers above it.
• Ruinart, 4 rue des Crayères, the oldest house (founded 1729), with chalk galleries that are a registered historic monument in their own right and lie nearly 40 metres down. From roughly €35–40, and often the most refined experience in town.

A word on strategy. One cellar tour teaches you the method; two teach you the difference between houses; three is a drinking session with stairs. If you only do one, take Taittinger for the abbey ruins or Ruinart for the pure geology. If you do two, add a grower-producer in the Saint-Nicaise quarter or a walk along the Avenue de Champagne side streets, where smaller houses pour at friendlier prices. Budget €50–70 per person for tours and tastings at two houses, and do not schedule a third before lunch.

What the Day-Trippers Miss

This is where Reims quietly outplays its reputation. The sites below sit within a twenty-minute walk of the cathedral, and on a typical summer Saturday you will share most of them with a handful of locals.

The Foujita Chapel (Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix), 33 rue du Champ de Mars. The artistic testament of Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886–1968), the Japanese-born painter of the School of Paris who converted to Catholicism in Reims in 1959 — baptised in the cathedral, with the president of Mumm as his godfather — and then, at eighty, designed and painted an entire Romanesque chapel from the ironwork to the frescoes in under two years. The interior fuses Japanese ink-painting sensibility with Christian iconography; the sacristy door's sixteen panels narrate sacred history; one window remembers Hiroshima. Foujita and his wife Kimiyo are buried here. Entry €5.50. Critical scheduling note: it opens to the general public only from May 2 to September 30, daily 10 AM–12 PM and 2–6 PM, closed Tuesdays and July 14; outside that window it is group reservations only. If you are in Reims between October and April, check the musees-reims.fr calendar or accept the miss.

Musée-Hôtel Le Vergeur, 36 place du Forum. A medieval-Renaissance mansion saved from ruin after 1918 by the amateur photographer and traveller Hugues Krafft, filled with period rooms and his collections — and holder of complete original series of Albrecht Dürer's Apocalypse and Great Passion engravings, which alone justify the €5.50 admission. Tuesday to Sunday, 10 AM–12 PM and 2–6 PM; closed Mondays. (Older guides list it on rue du Marc; the entrance is on Place du Forum.) Pair it with the cryptoporticus beneath the same square.

Carnegie Library, Place Carnegie. Reims was so devastated after 1918 that Andrew Carnegie funded a new library for the city, opened in 1928, mixing Art Deco and Art Nouveau under one roof — Jacques Simon stained glass, mosaic floors, a reading room built like a chapel to books. Free to enter during opening hours; quiet visitors welcome. Ten minutes from the cathedral.

Villa Demoiselle, 56 boulevard Henry Vasnier. Across from Pommery stands the 1904–1908 villa built for Henry Vasnier, right hand to Madame Pommery, at the exact hinge between Art Nouveau and Art Deco — interiors by Tony Selmersheim with glass by Gallé, furniture by Majorelle and Serrurier-Bovy, saved from demolition and restored over four years by Paul-François Vranken. Guided visits from €30 including a tasting; Monday, Thursday and Sunday 10 AM–6 PM, Friday and Saturday until 7 PM, closed Tuesday and Wednesday and closed midday 12–2. The single best Art Nouveau interior in the city.

Musée de la Reddition, 12 rue Franklin Roosevelt. On May 7, 1945, at 2:41 AM, Germany signed the act of unconditional surrender in a map room inside Eisenhower's SHAEF headquarters — a technical college on this street. The room is preserved exactly as it was, down to the ashtrays and the situation maps. Reopened in spring 2026 after a renovation. City-museum pricing (~€5.50), open daily 10 AM–6 PM, closed Tuesdays plus January 1, May 1, November 1 and December 25. Twenty minutes on foot from the cathedral and worth every step: this, and the cathedral's 1914 scars, are the two moments where Reims was the centre of world history and not just French history.

If your dates allow, the Halles du Boulingrin market — a rétro-futurist 1920s market hall on rue de Mars — runs Wednesday, Friday and Saturday mornings (Friday afternoons reserved for organic producers), and is the best single hour of food-watching in the city.

Eating Without Getting Fleeced

The rule is distance from the parvis. Restaurants ringing the cathedral square price for the day-trip coach market. Walk ten minutes in any direction and quality rises as prices fall.

For the full ceremonial experience, Brasserie du Boulingrin at 31 rue de Mars has been feeding Reims since 1925 in an untouched Art Deco room of mosaic floors, wood panelling and bow-tied waiters — oysters, steak tartare prepared à la minute, blanquette de veau, and a long list of grower champagnes by the glass. Mains run roughly €20–30; book for dinner. For regional specifics, order jambon de Reims (herb-crusted local ham), Chaource cheese, and the biscuit rose de Reims — the pink, twice-baked sponge engineered specifically to be dunked in champagne without collapsing, sold by Maison Fossier across the city. Rue de Vesle and the streets south of the cathedral carry the better everyday bistros.

What to Skip

Trying to see everything in a champagne day-trip. The classic Paris–Reims loop gives you roughly six usable hours. That is one cellar tour, the cathedral, and one other thing. Choose the second thing from this guide deliberately rather than rushing all five cellars and seeing none of the city.

The Palais du Tau — for now. It is closed until its 2027 reopening as the Musée des Sacres. If a guide or app tells you otherwise, the app is stale. The coronation treasury is not viewable; do not build your afternoon around it.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts in 2026. The fine arts museum is finishing a multi-year renovation with reopening expected in autumn 2026 — dates have moved before, so check musees-reims.fr before counting on it. (Its star collection, the Foujita holdings, is partially the reason the chapel matters anyway.)

The tourist-office minibus champagne circuits. Packaged "three houses in an afternoon" tours bundle transport you do not need — everything above is walkable or one tram stop — at a markup, and rush the one experience (a slow cellar visit) that rewards slowness. Book two houses directly and walk between them through Saint-Nicaise.

Lunch on the cathedral parvis. See above. Five minutes of walking saves you €15 a head and gets you better food.

Épernay, if you only have one day. The Avenue de Champagne is lovely, but splitting a single day between two towns means half a cathedral. Reims has the deeper history and the bigger cellars. Give Épernay its own day from Reims or Paris, or skip it without regret.

Practical Logistics

Getting there. TGV trains leave Paris Gare de l'Est roughly every 30–60 minutes; the ride to Reims centre station takes 45–50 minutes and fares run from about €16 one-way booked weeks ahead to €50 bought same-day. Some high-speed services stop only at Champagne-Ardenne TGV, 8 km out — the tram connects it to the centre in about 15 minutes, but check your ticket's station. The centre station is a 15-minute walk from the cathedral.

Getting around. The centre is walkable end to end in twenty minutes. Tram lines A and B and the CityBus cover the rest; a single ticket is a couple of euros. You will not need a car unless you are heading to the Montagne de Reims villages.

Money. Cathedral: free (towers €10–12). City museums (Saint-Remi, Le Vergeur, Reddition, Foujita): €5.50 each, free for under-25s — Reims periodically opens all of them free in winter, so check musees-reims.fr. Champagne tours: €28–40 standard, €55+ for prestige tiers. A comfortable full day, with two cellar visits and a proper lunch, lands at €150–220 per person before accommodation.

Timing. June and September are the sweet spots: warm, uncrowded, houses on full schedules. The Foujita Chapel is only open to individuals May 2–September 30 — a strong argument for a summer visit. Late August through October brings the harvest, the busiest and most atmospheric season in the cellars. The Christmas market pulls over 500,000 visitors and prices accordingly; the sound-and-light show runs summer evenings only. The towers are closed mid-November to mid-February.

One-day vs. overnight. The cathedral, one cellar, Saint-Remi, and Foujita's chapel fit a full but sane day. Staying overnight — and seeing the cathedral lit after dark — is the difference between ticking Reims off and understanding it.

About This Guide

Elena Vasquez is an art historian who writes about sacred architecture and the places where faith, politics and stone collided. She came to Reims to check the cathedral off a Gothic itinerary and stayed three days, most of them inside buildings she had not planned to enter. Her rule for coronation cities: read the facade before you photograph it, and always climb the towers. She writes for RoamGuru.