Burgundy–Franche-Comté

Bourgogne-Franche-Comté joins the old Duchy of Burgundy to the Franche-Comté, the ‘free county’ that belonged to the Habsburgs until Louis XIV took it in the 1670s. The merger of 2016 rebuilt, roughly, a territory the Valois dukes of Burgundy had ruled in the fifteenth century. Their court at Dijon rivalled that of Paris, and the tombs of the dukes, the Hospices at Beaune and countless village churches still show what that wealth could buy. The region’s capital today is Dijon, and Besançon, behind its Vauban citadel, is the main city of the east.

Burgundy is the gentler half: canals and slow rivers, Cistercian and Cluniac abbeys, and the narrow Côte where monks spent centuries mapping which patch of slope made which wine. Those parcels, the climats, are now a World Heritage site. Franche-Comté is wilder: the Jura’s folded limestone, deep spruce forests, turquoise lakes, waterfalls and the dead-end valleys called reculées, with villages tucked at the bottom of sheer cliffs.

For a traveller who has had enough of crowds, this is one of France’s most rewarding regions. Trains from Paris reach Dijon quickly, yet within an hour you can be on a towpath, in a village of a few hundred people or on a plateau where the only traffic is cows heading to the dairy that makes Comté. Come in autumn for the grape harvest and the gold of the vines, or in early summer when the Jura’s meadows are full of flowers.

• Vineyard slopes of the Côte d’Or
• Limestone reculées and waterfalls of the Jura
• Lakes and spruce forests of the Haut-Jura
• Canals and wooded hills of the Morvan
• Charolais pastures with white cattle

Facts

• Created on 1 January 2016 by merging Burgundy and Franche-Comté; the name was confirmed by the Conseil d’État in September 2016.
• Its highest point is the Crêt Pela (1,495 m) in the Jura mountains.
• The Climats, terroirs of Burgundy were inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2015.
• The Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1982, extended to Salins-les-Bains in 2009.