Bayeux Hotels

Bayeux is a small town (population 16,000) in northern France within the region of Basse-Normandie. Bayeux is best known for the remarkable Bayeux Tapestry that chronicles in visual form the conquest of England by William the Conquerer, Duke of Normandy, in 1066. Bayeux is known for two famous trans-Channel invasions. The conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066 started from Bayeux, while on June 6th, 1944 the Allied D-Day (French: Jour-J) invasion force struck the beaches just north of the town. Bayeux was the first French town to be liberated from Nazi occupation during the 1944 Battle of Normandy and survived almost completely unscathed. On 16 June 1946 General Charles de Gaulle made his first important speech on liberated French soil in Bayeux. The town hosts the largest British war cemetery in Normandy and is an excellent base for visiting the Normandy beaches. There's one reason why several million visitors descend on Bayeux every year – a 70m-long piece of painstakingly embroidered cloth known to the French as La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde (Tapestry of Queen Matilda), and to the rest of the world, rather more prosaically, as the Bayeux Tapestry. But there's more to the town than its impressive needlework – Bayeux was the first town to be liberated after D-Day, and is one of the few in Calvados to have survived WWII practically unscathed. Its winding streets are crammed with higgledy-piggledy period buildings, including a fine Gothic cathedral and lots of wooden-framed Norman houses, and the city is a perfect launch pad for exploring the invasion beaches just to the north.