Provins

Provins is a town of 12,000 in the Seine-et-Marne, 90 km south-east of Paris, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site — inscribed in 2001 as the outstanding surviving example of a medieval fair town.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Champagne fairs were the clearing house of European trade, and Provins hosted two of the six annual cycles. Cloth from Flanders, spices from the Levant and silver from Germany changed hands here, and the accounting techniques the Italian merchants developed at these fairs are the ancestors of modern banking.

When the trade moved to the sea routes in the fourteenth century, Provins stopped. That is why it is still standing.

The upper town

• Tour César — the twelfth-century keep, octagonal on a square base, 44 m; climb it for the view over the whole plain
• Collégiale Saint-Quiriace — begun in the twelfth century and never finished, the money having run out with the fairs; the dome is seventeenth-century
• Grange aux Dîmes — the thirteenth-century tithe barn, originally a fair merchants’ hall, with an exhibition on the fairs
• The ramparts — 1,200 m of twelfth- and thirteenth-century wall with twenty-two towers, walkable outside
• Souterrains — a network of tunnels cut in the chalk below the upper town, open for guided visits, with medieval graffiti on the walls

The lower town

Below the hill, along the Durteint and the Voulzie: the merchants’ quarter, with timber-framed houses, the thirteenth-century Église Saint-Ayoul and the Tour Notre-Dame-du-Val. Less visited than the upper town and worth the walk down.

The rose

Thibaut IV, count of Champagne, is said to have brought back from the Crusades the red rose that became the Rose de Provins — Rosa gallica officinalis, the apothecary’s rose, grown here for medicine and preserves ever since.

The story goes further: through the house of Lancaster, which took the red rose as its badge, Provins claims responsibility for one half of the Wars of the Roses. The Roseraie below the walls grows several hundred varieties and is open from May.

The shows

Provins runs its Middle Ages harder than anywhere else in France. From April to November there are daily spectacles: La Légende des Chevaliers (jousting and horsemanship), Les Aigles des Remparts (falconry from the ramparts), and a siege-machine display.

The Fête Médiévale in June turns the whole town over for a weekend — costume, markets, several tens of thousands of visitors. It is the largest event of its kind in France.

Food

The local pastry is the niflette — a small puff-pastry tart filled with orange-flower custard, sold around All Saints’ Day, its name from ne flete, “do not weep”, offered to mourning children. Provins also sells everything conceivable made from roses, and the region is Brie country: Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun are both made within an hour.

Getting to Provins

• By train — direct from Paris Gare de l’Est, about 1 h 25, roughly hourly. Easy as a day trip.
• By car — 90 km from Paris on the N4 or the A5; about 1 h 15. See parking in France.

When to go

April to October, when the shows run. June for the medieval festival, if you can face the crowds; May and June for the roses. Out of season much of the town closes and the upper town is empty and rather fine.

See UNESCO sites in France.

Weather in Provins

Updated: 25 August 2026