Skip the Line: Abbaye de Fontenay Admission Ticket

loika469, Sep 2023

Sans aucun doute l’une des plus belle abbaye cistercienne ! L’ensemble des bâtiments et les jardins sont remarquables. Parfaitement restauré et entretenu, le site vaut le détour !

Without doubt one of the most beautiful Cistercian abbeys! All the buildings and gardens are remarkable. Perfectly restored and maintained, the site is well worth a visit.

Rolf W, May 2022

Wonderful abbey to visit. Ample space to walk around. Buildings are in good shape, wonderful park to spend hours to relax.

Must see place when you stay in Burgundy.

Ample parking lots close by.

Charles-Louis_C, Oct 2021

A bit out of usual Burgundy circuits, this place is more than worth to do the trip.

Just amazing and more than justified to be classified by UNESCO.

Ali_travels2, Aug 2019

What a beautiful place! It is really pretty and very charming (even on a rainy day to start with). The whole complex is beautiful with the cloisters standing out as particularly nice. Entry was 10€ for an adult which considering the size of the place seems pretty reasonable. The information leaflet provided is good but a tour in English would have been great (they seemed to only do French tours).

Googly2010, Jun 2019

On a sunny Wednesday in early June the Abbaye was so quiet, with barely a handful of visitors - this made our self-guided tour very peaceful and relaxing. (The guided tour had just left when we arrived but the brochure in English is adequately informative so there was enough background information.) First impression is of the magnificent honeyed stone buildings set amid formal and informal gardens, a tribute to the restoration works carried out by the Montgolfiers and later the Aynard family who still live there. The abbey is over 1000 years old and was built by Bernard of Clairvaux, an adherent of the most austere form of Cistercian worship. Consequently the church, a wonderful Romanesque building, is very plain inside - a few remains have been gathered together more recently - but this just impresses on the visitor the harshness of the monks’ lives. In the huge first floor dormitory with its 15thC “ship’s hull” wooden roof we found a dead bat and swift, which my wife placed on the floor in front of the altar. The monks’ rooms and cloisters are all superb as is the later forge building where a fascinating replica of a 13thC water-powered hammer has recently been built. The abbey makes for a very pleasant 1-2 hour visit. Note that although a small outbuilding is signed “cafeteria”, this simply contains dispensing machines.