THE CORONATION CITY
Reims Cathedral: The Coronation City Beyond the Bubbles
Notre-Dame de Reims crowned French kings for centuries and survived catastrophic WWI damage — good reason to build a cathedral stop into a Champagne day trip.
See Champagne trips on GetYourGuide ↗A cathedral built for kings
Notre-Dame de Reims is one of the great Gothic cathedrals of France, built mostly in the thirteenth century on the site of earlier churches, and for centuries it served as the coronation church of the French monarchy. The tradition traces back to Clovis, the first king of the Franks, who was baptised in Reims in 496 — an event later kings invoked to justify being crowned in the same city. From the Middle Ages onward, most French kings were anointed and crowned at Reims rather than in Paris, a practice that continued right through to Charles X in 1825, making the cathedral one of the most historically significant religious buildings in the country, not just one of the most beautiful.
Scarred by war, rebuilt by hand
The cathedral was badly damaged during the First World War: German shelling in 1914 set its wooden roof alight, and the building was struck repeatedly over the following years, leaving it roofless and severely damaged by the war's end. Restoration took decades and drew on international support, including significant funding from the Rockefeller family, and the cathedral wasn't substantially reopened until the 1930s, with detailed work continuing long after. Some of the stained glass is much more recent still — including twentieth-century windows by Marc Chagall in one of the chapels — so what you see today is a genuine mix of medieval stone and modern craftsmanship, rebuilt around a structure nearly destroyed within living memory.
Beyond the cathedral: the Palais du Tau and Saint-Remi
Next to the cathedral, the Palais du Tau was the archbishop's palace and the traditional lodging and robing place for kings on their coronation day — it's now a museum holding original cathedral statuary, coronation regalia and treasury pieces, and is included in the same UNESCO listing as the cathedral itself. A short walk away, the Basilica of Saint-Remi, one of the oldest churches in France, holds the tomb of Saint Remigius, the bishop who baptised Clovis. Together the three sites — cathedral, palace and basilica — form a compact and often overlooked cluster of history in a city most visitors associate purely with Champagne.
A wine city as well as a royal one
Reims wears its two identities easily: grand religious history above ground, and grand Champagne cellars below it. Several of the best-known houses — Veuve Clicquot, Pommery, Taittinger, Ruinart and Mumm among them — are headquartered within a short drive or even a walk of the cathedral, so the city works well as a single stop that pairs coronation history with cellar visits, rather than treating them as two separate excursions. The old town around the cathedral also has a compact centre of cafés and shops worth half an hour on foot, before or after the wine, if the day allows it.
Fitting Reims into a day built around Champagne
Most day trips from Paris treat Reims as a stop alongside the cellar visits rather than a full day in its own right, which usually means an hour or two at the cathedral and perhaps a short walk through the centre. If Reims's history genuinely interests you, it's worth flagging to whoever you book with, since some tours spend more time in the city than others — a few lean almost entirely toward Épernay and the vineyards instead. Either way, seeing the cathedral even briefly adds a layer to the day that has nothing to do with wine, which for some travellers turns out to be the part they remember best.