Explore Rouen

Saint-Ouen is the former church of a Benedictine abbey founded around 750, rebuilt in Gothic style from 1318 and completed in the 15th century. The church is 137 m long under 33 m high vaults, about 80 of its original stained-glass windows survive on three levels, and it houses the last of the large organs built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.

The Aître Saint-Maclou is a former cemetery of the Saint-Maclou parish, created after the Black Death of 1348. Its courtyard is enclosed by timber-framed galleries built from 1526 to hold exhumed bones, their beams carved with skulls, bones and gravediggers' tools. From 1661 to 2014 the buildings housed schools, lastly the city's school of fine arts.

The Historial Jeanne d'Arc is a museum about Joan of Arc in the archbishop's palace of Rouen, beside the cathedral, opened in 2015. A multimedia route from the Gothic crypt to the great attic follows the 1456 inquiry that cleared her name, in the building where she was condemned in 1431, and further rooms show how her legend was built.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen is an art museum founded in 1801 and housed since the 1880s in a building by Louis Sauvageot. Its collections run from the 15th century to today, with paintings by Gérard David, Caravaggio, Velázquez, Poussin, Géricault, Delacroix and Monet, and an Impressionist collection given by François Depeaux in 1909.

Rouen Cathedral, dedicated to Notre-Dame, is the seat of the Archbishop of Rouen, built and rebuilt over more than eight centuries in styles from Early Gothic to Flamboyant. Its west front is the subject of a series of paintings by Claude Monet, and its cast-iron spire made it the tallest building in the world from 1876 to 1880.

The Gros Horloge is an astronomical clock in Rouen whose movement dates from 1389, set since 1529 in a Renaissance arch spanning the Rue du Gros-Horloge. Its gilded dial shows the hour with a single hand, the phases of the moon and the day of the week. A visit leads through the dial room and the Gothic belfry to a view over the city.

The Church of St Joan of Arc stands on the Place du Vieux-Marché, where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431. Designed by Louis Arretche and completed in 1979, its sweeping slate roof evokes flames and an upturned boat, and inside it holds 16th-century stained-glass windows from the destroyed Church of Saint-Vincent.