BENEDICTINE PALACE

Just a stone’s throw from the beach, let yourself be drawn into the maze of this fabulous red-brick building, born of a merchant’s passion for a liqueur, the famous Bénédictine. The story begins at Fécamp Abbey, where monks lived according to the rule of Saint Benedict, based on prayer, manual labor and study. Philosophers and herbalists rubbed shoulders in an atmosphere of alchemy stimulated by the proximity of the cliffs where angelica, hyssop and lemon balm grew, ingredients for elixirs of all kinds. A recipe, developed by the monk Dom Bernardo Vincelli, who had come from Italy with spices from the Orient in his saddlebag, and believed to prolong life, became famous throughout the region over time. Used for three centuries, it disappeared during the French Revolution. But one man found it while sorting through his library! It was Alexandre Le Grand, a local wine merchant with a passion for art and history, who had built up a collection of books and liturgical objects from those bequeathed by his grandfather from the abbey. The text that would make his reputation and fortune appears in one of the grimoires written by Dom Bernardo Vincelli in 1510, revealing the twenty-seven plants that make it up. In 1863, he unlocked its secret and christened it Benedictine. To produce it, he set up a distillery and brought it up to date. In 1872, he decided to open his treasures to the public, and when the factory became too small, he undertook the construction of a palace, inaugurated in 1888. One of the merchant’s "whims" was the oratory, built in the flamboyant Gothic style to reproduce the world of the monks of Fécamp Abbey. The Gothic room, meanwhile, features a wooden framework carved in the shape of an inverted ship’s hull by the port’s carpenters. The Alexandre-Le-Grand room, used for bottling and labeling until 1972, traces the history of the liqueur. The distillery and cellars follow: stills and oak tuns are the heart of the premises. A tasting concludes the visit. And if you want to extend the pleasure, "La Verrière", a bar and tea room created in 2021 by Pierre-Cyrille Acquier, invites you to a unique tasting experience of cocktails, teas and chocolates made with Bénédictine, to be accompanied by delicacies or an aperitif board. We’re particularly fond of the Bénédictine Café, topped with chantilly cream, a little heavy on the alcohol but delicious! The boutique sells Bénédictine in all its forms.