France

France has been the world's most visited country for decades, and the reason lies less in any single icon than in the depth of its regional fabric: for centuries the country was a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies and provinces, and the old plurality still shows in the way landscapes, regional languages, cuisines and wines shift with every border crossed. The Loire Valley holds more than three hundred Renaissance châteaux built during the 16th century, when the kings had installed their court along its banks. Normandy carries both the chalk cliffs of Étretat and the memory of 6 June 1944 inscribed in its beaches. Brittany, an Atlantic peninsula that has kept its Celtic identity, sets its granite coast against the limestone plateaus of the mainland, while Provence builds its image around the lavender of the Valensole plateau and the light that shaped Cézanne and Van Gogh. The vineyards of Bordeaux and Champagne, the Riviera from Nice to Menton, the Alps around Mont Blanc and the gastronomic Rhône valley complete a country that, on its own, gathers almost every climate and cultural variation of Western Europe.

Practical info

Language: French
Currency: Euro (€)
Time zone: UTC+1 (CET)
Rail network: TGV + TER, all regions connected

Regions

Paris and surroundings

A short distance from the capital, royal France and Impressionist France sit side by side within a narrow radius that compresses several centuries of history and art. Versailles, begun in 1661 under Louis XIV, was conceived as the seat of absolute power; its 800 hectares of gardens designed by André Le Nôtre and the Hall of Mirrors remain the most studied elements of French classical architecture. Fontainebleau, a royal residence since the 12th century, hosted Francis I, Henry IV and Napoleon I; its Francis I gallery is regarded as the manifesto of the French Renaissance. Giverny preserves Claude Monet's house and water garden, where the Nymphéas series now shown at the Orangerie was painted. Provins has kept a remarkably intact medieval fabric, UNESCO-listed, as a record of the great 13th-century Champagne fairs. Vaux-le-Vicomte, completed in 1661 by Nicolas Fouquet, is the prototype of the French classical garden from which Versailles would draw its template; Chantilly combines a centuries-old estate of horse-breeding with a collection of paintings that rivals the Louvre in density.

VersaillesFontainebleauGivernyProvinsVaux-le-VicomteChantilly

Normandy

Normandy is a region that carries, at once, its landscape and its memory. The chalk cliffs of Étretat, rising above a hundred metres, were painted by Monet, Courbet and Boudin before becoming the most recognisable image of the Alabaster Coast; Mont-Saint-Michel, a granite islet standing in a tidal bay on the border between Normandy and Brittany, has hosted a Benedictine abbey since 708 whose architecture conforms to the shape of the rock itself. The D-Day beaches — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, Sword — still bear the physical traces of 6 June 1944 in their bunkers, military cemeteries and museums that reconstruct one of the most decisive operations of the 20th century. Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned in 1431, preserves a Gothic cathedral whose façade Monet painted at different hours of the day in a famous series. Honfleur, a small port at the mouth of the Seine, was the birthplace of Impressionism; Bayeux has kept since the 11th century the tapestry that tells the story of the Norman conquest of England. Behind the coast, hedgerows, apple orchards and dairy farms produce the camembert, cider and calvados that define the regional cuisine.

Mont-Saint-MichelD-Day BeachesÉtretatRouenHonfleurBayeux

Brittany

Brittany is a region that has kept its own identity within France; settled since antiquity by the Celts, it still preserves a Breton language taught in schools and the megalithic alignments of Carnac — more than three thousand standing stones dating from the 5th millennium BCE, well before Stonehenge. Its 2,700 kilometres of coastline — a third of the French shore — take strikingly varied forms: the Pink Granite Coast between Perros-Guirec and Ploumanac'h owes its colour to a granite 300 million years old, and Saint-Malo, standing behind its grey-granite ramparts, recalls the privateer city that built its fortune on Atlantic trade and raiding at sea. The Pointe du Raz, a wind-battered Atlantic headland, has been designated a Grand Site de France. The regional cuisine rests on buckwheat — the savoury galette — and on the seafood landed each morning at Douarnenez, Loctudy and Saint-Guénolé. Dinan preserves a fortified medieval centre that falls steeply down to the Rance.

Saint-MaloPink Granite CoastQuimperCarnacPointe du RazDinan

Champagne

Champagne is one of the few regions in the world to have given its name to a drink poured everywhere without everyone knowing that it can only come from here; the appellation is legally protected and the vineyard has been UNESCO-listed since 2015. Reims carries its Gothic cathedral, completed in the 13th century, where thirty-three kings of France were crowned, from Louis VIII in 1223 to Charles X in 1825; the stained-glass windows installed by Marc Chagall in 1974 are the modern counterpoint to the medieval fabric. Beneath the city, the Gallo-Roman chalk pits have served since the 18th century as natural cellars for the great houses; Pommery, Taittinger and Veuve Clicquot keep their bottles at constant temperature there. In Épernay, the Avenue de Champagne brings together, within less than a kilometre, Moët & Chandon, Perrier-Jouët and Mercier; cellars sometimes run more than thirty metres below street level, where bottles age on wooden laths. The slopes planted with pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay form an ordered, rolling landscape whose underlying chalk shapes the very character of the wine.

ReimsÉpernayReims CathedralAvenue de ChampagneChampagne houses

Burgundy

Burgundy is a region where the bond between soil, cellar and table has been built since the Middle Ages around the idea of the climat — the single parcel of land in which soil, exposure and know-how produce a wine that cannot be replicated; the 1,247 climats of the Burgundy vineyard have been UNESCO-listed since 2015. The Route des Grands Crus runs sixty kilometres from Dijon to Santenay and passes through Gevrey-Chambertin, Vougeot, Vosne-Romanée, Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet, names that alone evoke some of the most sought-after pinot noirs and chardonnays in the world. Beaune has kept the Hospices founded in 1443 by Nicolas Rolin, chancellor of Philip the Good; their polychrome glazed-tile roofs are the city's architectural emblem. The annual wine auction held at the Hospices on the third Sunday of November is one of the oldest charity sales in the world. Vézelay, perched on its hill, has hosted since the 11th century the basilica of Sainte-Madeleine, a major centre of European Romanesque art and a historical starting point for one of the Camino de Santiago routes. Cluny preserves the remains of what was, before St Peter's in Rome, the largest church in Christendom. The regional cuisine — bœuf bourguignon, coq au vin, escargots, Dijon mustard — was written alongside these lands and these wines.

BeauneDijonHospices de BeauneRoute des Grands CrusCluny AbbeyVézelay

Lyon and its region

Lyon, after Paris, is the second metropolis of France; its position at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône, already recognised by the Romans who founded Lugdunum there in 43 BCE, made it for centuries the capital of the Gauls. The Renaissance left it the largest architectural ensemble of its kind in Europe, concentrated in the Vieux Lyon and UNESCO-listed since 1998. Its traboules — covered passages that cut through the courtyards of entire blocks — once sheltered bolts of silk from the rain; they were also used by the Resistance during the Second World War. Fourvière, the hill that overlooks the city, carries a Neo-Byzantine basilica completed in 1884 and the remains of the Roman theatres. The bouchons lyonnais, culinary institutions that appeared in the 19th century, codified a cuisine of charcuterie and home cooking that Paul Bocuse later carried up to the summit of gastronomy from Collonges-au-Mont-d'Or. To the west and north, the vineyards of Beaujolais spread their ten crus across granite hillsides; Pérouges, a perfectly preserved medieval town, has long served as a set for period films.

Vieux LyonTraboulesFourvièreConfluencesPérougesBeaujolais

French Alps

The French Alps occupy the western end of Europe's highest range and culminate at Mont Blanc, 4,809 metres, whose first documented ascent was made on 8 August 1786 by Jacques Balmat and Michel Paccard. Chamonix has long been the world capital of mountaineering; it hosted the first Olympic Winter Games in 1924. The Aiguille du Midi cable car, built in 1955, rises to 3,842 metres in a few minutes and opens onto a panorama that takes in Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and the Écrins range. Annecy preserves a medieval centre crossed by canals and rimmed by a glacial lake whose transparency owes to strict ecological protection since the 1960s. Megève, a Savoyard village transformed between the wars into an upscale resort by the Rothschilds, has kept its old chalets and its 17th-century church. The Trois Vallées — Courchevel, Méribel, Val Thorens — form the largest connected ski area in the world with 600 kilometres of runs. In summer, the same valleys turn into ground for hiking, paragliding and pass-climbing on the bike.

ChamonixAnnecyMegèveLes 3 ValléesAiguille du MidiLake Annecy

French Riviera

The Côte d'Azur — a name coined by the writer Stéphen Liégeard in 1887 — stretches along the Mediterranean coast from Cassis to Menton and owes its success to a particular light that the Impressionists and later the moderns — Monet, Renoir, Matisse, Chagall, Picasso — recognised from the second half of the 19th century. Nice, French since 1860, has kept its Italianate old town and the seven-kilometre Promenade des Anglais, funded in 1820 by the British community. Monaco, the world's second-smallest state after the Vatican, has built its fortune since 1863 around the Monte-Carlo casino designed by Charles Garnier. Cannes has held its international film festival every May since 1946. Saint-Tropez, a simple fishing port until the 1950s, owes its global reputation to Roger Vadim and Brigitte Bardot. The hilltop villages — Èze at 427 metres above the sea, Saint-Paul-de-Vence where Chagall and Prévert lived — reflect a defensive medieval urbanism. Grasse, the world capital of perfume since the 18th century, has kept its fields of jasmine, rose centifolia and tuberose that still supply the great houses.

NiceMonacoCannesSaint-TropezÈzeAntibesSaint-Paul-de-VenceGrasse

Provence and lavender

Provence is the most painted and most written region of southern France; the light, the low Mediterranean vegetation, the dry-stone walls and the limestone relief form a landscape whose internal coherence Cézanne, Van Gogh, Giono and Daudet each worked in their own way. The Valensole plateau, at about 600 metres of altitude, holds the lavender bloom between mid-June and mid-July; the plant, also grown for the Grasse perfume industry, has shaped a landscape that has become emblematic. The Cistercian abbey of Sénanque, founded in 1148 in a narrow valley, offers the austere contrast of its Romanesque architecture against the surrounding rows of lavender. Avignon was, from 1309 to 1377, the official residence of the papacy; the Palais des Papes remains the largest Gothic palace in Europe. Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne's birthplace, keeps an 18th-century centre of private mansions and fountains fed by thermal springs known since Roman times. The Luberon, classified as a regional nature park, strings together its ochre and pale-stone villages — Gordes, Roussillon whose cliffs take their red from ochre deposits, Bonnieux, Ménerbes, Lourmarin — along a route that has in turn drawn writers, filmmakers and leading fashion houses.

ValensoleSénanqueLuberonAix-en-ProvenceAvignonGordesRoussillon

Bordeaux and wine country

Bordeaux is a name that evokes wine at once, yet the city does not reduce to its bottles. Its Port of the Moon, UNESCO-listed since 2007, forms the largest classified urban ensemble in Europe: more than 350 hectares of 18th-century pale-stone façades, bordered by a Garonne that the landscape architect Michel Corajoud transformed in 2006 with the Miroir d'Eau, the largest reflecting water mirror in the world. The Saint-Pierre quarter keeps medieval lanes that predate the city's classical expansion. Around it, the Bordeaux vineyard is the largest AOC wine region in France at 110,000 hectares; Saint-Émilion, a medieval village UNESCO-listed since 1999, has been cultivating vines since Gallo-Roman times and shelters a monolithic church carved from the rock between the 9th and 12th centuries. The Médoc, on the left bank of the Gironde, strings together Margaux, Pauillac and Saint-Estèphe, home to the châteaux classified in 1855. The Cité du Vin, opened in 2016 in a contemporary building that echoes the swirl of wine in a glass, proposes a global journey through the civilisations of wine. Further south, the Dune du Pilat rises to 102 metres above the Bay of Arcachon, the ever-shifting crest of Europe's tallest sand dune system.

Bordeaux city centreSaint-ÉmilionMédocCité du VinArcachonDune du Pilat

Loire Valley châteaux

The Loire Valley welcomed the French court from the 15th to the early 17th century, when the kings preferred this gentle landscape to the severity of the capital; this is the period that produced or transformed the more than three hundred châteaux that now line the valley, UNESCO-listed since 2000 along 280 kilometres between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes. Chambord, begun in 1519 at the request of Francis I, counts 440 rooms and a double-helix staircase attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Chenonceau spans the Cher through an arched gallery partly designed by Catherine de' Medici; it is sometimes called the Château of the Ladies for having been successively inhabited by Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de' Medici and Louise of Lorraine. Villandry, completed around 1536, keeps the most meticulously recomposed Renaissance gardens in France, with their box-hedge parterres and geometric vegetable plots. Amboise hosted Leonardo da Vinci from 1516 until his death in 1519; his remains rest in the château's Saint-Hubert chapel. Azay-le-Rideau and Blois complete a corridor whose tufa substrate — a soft limestone — has supplied both the fabric of the walls and, in its former quarries, the cellars where the wines of Vouvray and Chinon still age.

ChambordChenonceauAmboiseVillandryAzay-le-RideauBlois

Alsace

Alsace is a border region that changed nation four times between 1871 and 1945, which left it a cultural identity between France and Germany, visible in the architecture, the regional language and the cuisine. Strasbourg, a European capital since the Parliament was installed there in 1979, preserves a pink-sandstone cathedral completed in 1439 that was, until 1874, the tallest building in the world at 142 metres; the Grande Île, its historic core, has been UNESCO-listed since 1988. Colmar keeps one of the best-preserved medieval centres in France, including the canal-lined Petite Venise and the collegiate Saint-Martin. The Unterlinden Museum there holds the Isenheim Altarpiece painted by Matthias Grünewald between 1512 and 1516. The Route des Vins, 170 kilometres long between Marlenheim and Thann, crosses wine villages — Riquewihr, Eguisheim, Kaysersberg — that have kept their 16th-century half-timbered houses; the Alsatian vineyard produces chiefly Riesling, Gewürztraminer and Pinot Gris. In winter, the Christmas markets of Strasbourg, whose earliest edition dates to 1570, and of Colmar are among the oldest in Europe.

StrasbourgColmarRoute des VinsChristmas MarketsHaut-KœnigsbourgRiquewihr

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