7 Unmissable Day Trips Out of Paris

Around 45 minutes by train.

Fontainebleau is a town with a royal past. Thirty-four French sovereigns, from Louis VI in the 11th century to Napoleon III in the 19th century, have spent time in and around the hamlet, whether that be in its forests, which Louis IX called his personal “wilderness”, or in the spectacular Château de Fontainebleau, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981. So, when visiting Fontainebleau, there’s no better thing to do than follow in these esteemed footstops, with both the forests and the castle now being open to the public. The Fontainebleau Forest is the third-largest wooded space in France, covering 250 km2, and was designated as the world’s first nature reserve in the nineteenth century following the emergence of an artistic cult around the forest, particularly among the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. Today it offers a variety of walks and hikes for those looking to get out the city and sink back into nature for an hour or two.

The Château de Fontainebleau, meanwhile, is one of the largest royal chateaux in France, containing 1,500 rooms on top of 35-acres of French-style garden space courtesy of André Le Nôtre, who also landscaped the gardens at Versailles. Within the Château you will be able to explore the Napoleon I Museum, the Grand Appartements, the Imperial Theatre, the Turkish Boudoir, and the Chinese Museum, amongst other rooms. Between the palace, the gardens, and the forest, Fontainebleau is an ideal fairytale escape from Paris.

Around 1 hour by train.

The Château de Versailles doesn’t need an introduction. Originally a mere hunting lodge for King Louis XIII to capitalise on the natural wealth of the nearby woods, Versailles would become the icon it is known as today when his son Louis XIV, also known as “the Sun King”, decided to transform the small home into the new heart of the French court. The move was a strategic one, giving the sovereign direct access and control over the nobility who had hitherto been scattered around the country, and every intricate detail of the building was planned to showcase his regal power and wealth.

Today, Versailles is an internationally-recognised world heritage site of “outstanding universal value”, according to the UNESCO website. Come and stroll the corridors of the main-event palace, an endeavour that could take a whole day in itself given the 2,300 rooms and 8.15 square kilometres of floor space. However the gardens are well worth a visit if you find the time too, particularly Marie Antoinette’s hamlet at Trianon, a model fairytale village she had built for herself when the stresses of court life were getting too much.

Around 1 hour by train.

Despite its tiny size, Giverny has become France’s second Impressionist capital (after Paris, of course) thanks to its settlement by Claude Monet and a colony of American Impressionists in his wake in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The village’s star attraction is naturally the Fondation Monet, located in the former home and gardens of the emblematic painter. Here, he spent 43 years of his life masterfully gardening and curating the landscape to help inspire his work, ,introducing water lilies, a weeping willow, and a Japanese bridge, all of which are now iconic motifs of the artist. And, although Monet’s paintings largely aren’t stored in the home, the museum contains a collection of over 200 Japanese ukiyo-e prints from the 18th and 19th centuries by masters such as Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige that Monet collected and from which he took inspiration.

Around 1 hour by train.

Chartes is famous worldwide for its UNESCO World Heritage site cathedral which, in the words of UNESCO, marked “the high point of French Gothic art”. Built between 1194 and 1220, it is instantly recognisable for its synthesis of High Gothic, Romanesque, and Flamboyant styles and is still today one of the most popular places of Marian pilgrimage in Western Christianity, housing the Sancta Camisa, the tunic alleged to have been worn by the Virgin Mary at Christ’s birth, and a rare Black Madonna that was venerated and crowned by Pope Pius IX in May 1855.

There are dozens of smaller churches in the town dating from between the 11th and 17th centuries too, as well as a 24-hour clock dating to the 16th century. Other attractions include the International Stained Glass Centre which displays examples of stained glass dating to antiquity, and the peculiar Maison Picassiette, a mosaic jewel box home decorated head-to-toe in pieces of broken china. For medieval art lovers, Chartes cannot be missed.

Around 1.5 hours by train.

Auvers-sur-Oise is the finally resting place of Van Gogh, an enchanting hamlet in the Val-d’Oise that he once described as “seriously beautiful,” and where he passed some of his last days, producing over eighty paintings in the seventy days he spent here. The architecture of the village is so charmingly French, roses climbing each pastel-shuttered stone building. And although it is primarily Van Gogh the village is associated with (the house Van Gogh stayed in, the Auberge Ravoux, being one of its primary tourist attractions) it was also a wellspring of inspiration for his contemporaries too, including Cézanne and Pissarro. The down is now dotted with little signs and ‘artist’s trails’ that compare real-life locations in the villages to famous impressionist and pointillist renditions of the landscapes. Or, just enjoy the tranquil countryside: the village is also famous for the vast wheatfields that surround it, offering serene bucolic walks if you want to get lost in a rural wonderland.

Other attractions include the Château d’Auvers, a seventeenth-century, Louis XIII-style mansion, and the Musée de l’Absinthe.

Around 1.5 hours by train.

A medieval Norman town that packs a lot of history, Rouen is perhaps most famous as the city where Joan of Arc was tried, burnt, and martyred back in the 1400s. Flanked by imposing Gothic architecture along its narrow, cobbled streets, the city skyline is dominated by the Rouen Cathedral, a favourite subject of Monet which, for a period of four years in the 1870s, was the tallest building in the world thanks to a renovation to its neo-Gothic. The cathedral itself is extremely storied too, having existed in some form since the 1st century and holding the tomb of Richard the Lionheart.

Another medieval favourite in Rouen is its astronomical clock, the mechanisms of which were made in the fourteenth century whose face dates to 1529, making it the largest clock of its kind still intact. The Musée de Beaux Arts in Rouen, meanwhile, is one of the best of in the country and features art, sculpture, and decorative items from the 1500s onwards, including works by Caravaggio, van Dyck, Velázquez, Renoir, Degas, and Monet.

Around 2.5 hours by train.

Saint-Malo, snugly situated on the Breton coastline, offers an enchanting seaside escape from the City of Light. A small walled town with a proud local heritage (it even declared itself an independent republic in the 16th century!), the town became notorious in the 19th century as a den of pirates who would force English ships passing the channel to pay in coins and goods to pass through. Nowadays, the walls and old town, with some sections dating to as early as the 11th century, can still be traipsed by visiting tourists. Or, you could head straight to one of the various nearby beaches! The Grand Bé is a perennial favourite steeped in history, having seen combat during the Second World War and being home to the grave of romantic nineteenth-century French writer Chateaubriand.