France

Stays in Beauvais

Beauvais is a Picardy market town built around a single, unfinished ambition: the choir of Cathedrale Saint-Pierre reaches 48.5 metres, the tallest Gothic stone vault ever raised, and the transept never got its nave. Inside, the cathedral's 1868 astronomical clock by local engineer Auguste-Lucien Verite still runs 52 dials for visitors. A June 1940 bombing destroyed most of the medieval centre, so today's Beauvais is mostly a postwar rebuild of wide streets around the surviving cathedral, the former Bishop's Palace that now houses the MUDO museum, and the reborn tapestry workshops Colbert founded here in 1664. Beauvais-Tille Airport, about 4 km out, has been Ryanair's only Paris base since the late 1990s, putting an unusually well-connected budget gateway inside an otherwise quiet cathedral town roughly an hour from central Paris.

Updated August 12, 2026