Alésia Where to stay near the site of Vercingétorix

In the summer of 52 BC, Vercingétorix, the Arvernian chief who had managed to unite the Gaulish peoples, took refuge on the oppidum of Alésia with eighty thousand men. Julius Caesar laid siege to him there and had a prodigious double line of fortifications raised around the hill — a circumvallation facing outward, a contravallation facing the stronghold: dozens of kilometres of palisades, towers and traps.

Caught between the Roman entrenchments and the failure of the Gaulish relief army, Vercingétorix finally surrendered. His surrender, at the foot of Caesar's camp, marks the end of Gaulish independence and the lasting entry of our regions into the Roman world. Now a Gallo-Roman town, Alésia flourished for several centuries before fading away — until excavations, encouraged by Napoléon III, rediscovered its traces in the 19^th century.

Raised at the top of the plateau in 1865 at the behest of Napoléon III, the colossal statue of Vercingétorix by the sculptor Aimé Millet towers seven metres over the plain. Dreamy face, Gaulish moustache, it has fixed for generations the image of the chief who was defeated but unbowed.

For a stay at Maison Jazey, Alésia is the perfect counterpoint to the abbeys and the vineyards: a day at the very roots of Gaul, a stone's throw from Flavigny and the Forges de Buffon.