Vézelay

People lived near the salt springs below the hill as early as 2300 BC. The Romans planted vines on the hill. In the 9th century Girart de Roussillon founded a convent of nuns at what is now Saint-Père; after the Normans drove them out in the 870s, the community was refounded on the hill with Benedictine monks. Around the turn of the millennium, according to legend, relics of Mary Magdalene were brought here from Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, and in 1058 the pope confirmed their authenticity.

Pilgrims poured in. Between 1050 and 1250 Vézelay was the largest sanctuary of the Magdalene in Western Europe and a starting point for the road to Santiago de Compostela. The abbey church was consecrated in 1104, and the village grew into a small town whose people fought the abbots for their rights. In 1146 Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade here before King Louis VII, and in 1190 Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart met here to set out on the Third. The town was walled in 1150.

Decline set in when the pope recognised the body found at Saint-Maximin as Mary Magdalene's in 1279, and the pilgrims turned away. In 1790 the revolutionary authorities ended the religious community at the abbey. From 1840 to 1859 the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc restored the decaying church. In the 20th century writers including Romain Rolland, Georges Bataille and Jules Roy settled on the "inspired hill", Franciscans returned to La Cordelle in 1949, and a monastic community came back to the basilica in 1993.

Vézelay's identity is bound up with pilgrimage. The basilica remains a living church, and walkers still set out from here on the Via Lemovicensis, one of the main French routes to Santiago de Compostela. The Fraternités monastiques de Jérusalem keep the daily round of prayer in the basilica, and three Franciscan brothers lived at the hermitage of La Cordelle in 2025.

The village has also drawn artists and writers. It is known as the "colline inspirée", the inspired hill, and among those who lived here were the novelist Romain Rolland, the writer Georges Bataille and the author Jules Roy. The art publisher Christian Zervos and his wife Yvonne had a house here, designed by Jean Badovici and Eileen Gray, which is now a foundation for contemporary art and architecture.

Wine is the other local tradition. In January 2019 Vézelay hosted the 75th Saint-Vincent Tournante, the travelling wine festival of Burgundy overseen by the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin. The pace of the place is slow, and visitors are expected to respect the quiet of the basilica and its services.

Vézelay is tiny: about 476 people lived in the commune in 2023, though that figure has been rising. Many more visitors than residents climb the hill on a summer day, and the village's shops, galleries, restaurants and guest houses live largely from tourism and pilgrimage, alongside the vineyards and farms on the plain below.

Daily life follows the seasons. In summer the main street is busy from morning to evening with walkers, pilgrims and day trippers; in winter the village returns to its few hundred residents, the monastic community of the basilica and the farmers and winegrowers around it. The commune includes several hamlets scattered across the plain, and Avallon, about 15 km away, is the nearest town.

The landscape around it, at the northern edge of the Morvan hills and above the Cure valley, which long served as the main waterway of the area and the border between the Nivernais and Burgundy, is rural and thinly populated, and life for most residents depends on the car.

The food of Vézelay is that of Burgundy. Restaurants on the main street serve the regional classics: bœuf bourguignon, beef braised in red wine; œufs en meurette, eggs in a red-wine sauce; escargots, snails baked in their shells with parsley butter; and gougères, savoury choux pastries made with cheese. Époisses, a pungent washed-rind cow's-milk cheese, and crème de cassis, the blackcurrant liqueur used in kir, are found throughout the area.

The local wine has its own name. The vineyards on the slopes around the village produce light reds and whites; the whites, made from Chardonnay, were recognised as Bourgogne Vézelay in 1996 and became an appellation of their own, Vézelay, in 2017. Shops along the main street sell local wine, cheese and jams.

The Romans first planted vines here, and a temple to Bacchus was found in the foundations of an old church in 1689. Centuries later the parish was described as rough, dry and stony country producing only mediocre wine and little wheat.