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C’est pas ~~Paris~~

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All 40 places

Forty places across all thirteen regions: villages, small towns, coast and mountains. Each page has the history, what to see, the train from Paris and the climate.

0h40 Town · Île-de-France (beyond Paris) Fontainebleau Seven centuries of French kings in one palace, wrapped in a vast forest of sandstone boulders, oaks and painters’ viewpoints.

1h06 City · Hauts-de-France Amiens France’s largest Gothic cathedral, floating market gardens reached by flat-bottomed boat, and the town where Jules Verne spent his last thirty years.

1h21 Town · Île-de-France (beyond Paris) Provins The great medieval fair town of Champagne, still walled, with a twelfth-century keep, merchants’ cellars and tunnels under the streets.

1h21 City · Pays de la Loire Angers The old capital of Anjou: a striped fortress of seventeen towers guarding the greatest medieval tapestry in the world.

1h30 Town · Centre–Val de Loire Amboise A royal château over the Loire, the manor where Leonardo da Vinci spent his last three years, and a chapel that holds what may be his bones.

1h31 City · Grand Est Nancy An eighteenth-century square gilded by a Polish king, a medieval ducal town, and the French capital of Art Nouveau.

1h32 Town · Hauts-de-France Laon A medieval town on a ridge above the Picardy plain, with a Gothic cathedral whose towers are guarded by sixteen stone oxen.

1h40 Town · Pays de la Loire Saumur A white-stone town on the Loire, crowned by a fairy-tale château, home of the Cadre Noir riders and sparkling wine aged in caves.

1h49 Coast · Normandy Étretat White chalk cliffs carved into arches and a needle, a shingle beach between them, and a village that painters and writers made famous.

1h56 City · Centre–Val de Loire Bourges A Gothic cathedral with no transept and five great portals, a merchant’s palace, and market gardens on the marshes at the edge of town.

2h05 Town · Burgundy–Franche-Comté Beaune A walled wine town with the most famous roof in Burgundy, a medieval hospital for the poor, and the Côte’s great vineyards at the edge of town.

2h12 Coast · Normandy Honfleur A slate-hung harbour town at the mouth of the Seine, where explorers sailed for Canada and painters learned to paint the sky.

2h12 Town · Normandy Bayeux Home of the Tapestry, freed the day after D-Day: a Norman cathedral, water mills on the river Aure and the landing beaches close by.

2h17 Village · Burgundy–Franche-Comté Vézelay One street climbing a Burgundian hill to a Romanesque basilica where, on the summer solstice, sunlight lays a path of light down the nave.

2h20 Town · Grand Est Colmar Painted timber houses over the canals of Little Venice, one of Europe’s most overwhelming altarpieces, and the Alsace wine route at the door.

2h29 Coast · Brittany Saint-Malo A granite corsair city ringed by ramparts, with island forts you can walk to at low tide and some of the biggest tides in Europe.

2h29 Town · Centre–Val de Loire Chinon A long royal fortress above the Vienne where Henry II died and Joan of Arc met her king, a slate-roofed old town and red wine from cabernet franc.

2h33 Coast · Nouvelle-Aquitaine La Rochelle An Atlantic port guarded by medieval towers, with arcaded streets, a stubborn Protestant past and a long tradition of doing things by bike.

2h38 Village · Burgundy–Franche-Comté Arbois Pasteur’s home town, capital of Jura wine: vin jaune, a river running under houses, and a limestone gorge just beyond the last street.

2h39 Town · Grand Est Langres A walled hilltop town near the source of the Marne: Diderot’s birthplace, with 3.6 km of ramparts to walk all the way round.

2h39 Village · Hauts-de-France Montreuil-sur-Mer A walled hilltop town that lost its sea, where Victor Hugo set the opening of Les Misérables and Haig ran the British army in the First World War.

2h44 Village · Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Pérouges A walled weavers’ town on a hilltop near Lyon, cobbled end to end, with a liberty tree in the square and sugar galette in every oven.

2h44 Village · Nouvelle-Aquitaine Saint-Émilion A honey-stone wine town tumbling into a hollow of the limestone, with a church carved out of the rock beneath its steep lanes.

3h02 Town · Brittany Dinan Half-timbered houses, 2.6 km of ramparts and a cobbled street plunging seventy-five metres down to a little port on the Rance.

3h02 Town · Pays de la Loire Guérande A walled Breton town of grey granite overlooking a chequerboard of salt marshes, where paludiers still rake salt by hand.

3h28 Town · Brittany Quimper Capital of Cornouaille, where rivers meet under a crooked Gothic cathedral and hand-painted faience has been made since the seventeenth century.

3h36 Town · Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Arles A Roman city on the Rhône where Van Gogh painted his brightest year, with an arena still in use and the Camargue at its gates.

3h43 Lake & mountains · Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Annecy Canals, a prison on an island and a lake clear enough to swim in, with the Alps standing right at the end of the street.

4h27 Town · Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Le Puy-en-Velay A cathedral town built on volcanic plugs, where a chapel crowns a ‘needle’ of rock and pilgrims set off for Santiago every morning.

4h53 Town · Nouvelle-Aquitaine Sarlat-la-Canéda The golden-stone capital of the Périgord Noir: Gothic and Renaissance mansions, stone-slab roofs and one of France’s great food markets.

5h15 Mountains · Nouvelle-Aquitaine Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port A walled Basque town of red sandstone on the river Nive, where pilgrims to Santiago set off over the Pyrenees.

5h24 Town · Occitanie Carcassonne A medieval fortress city with two rings of walls and dozens of towers on a hill above the Aude, rescued from demolition in the 1850s.

5h32 Mountains · Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Chamonix-Mont-Blanc The valley where mountaineering was born: Mont Blanc over the rooftops, a glacier by rack railway, and a cable car to nearly 3,850 metres.

6h02 City · Occitanie Albi A red-brick episcopal city on the Tarn: a fortress-cathedral painted inside from floor to vault, and the world’s largest Toulouse-Lautrec collection.

6h18 Coast · Occitanie Collioure A Catalan fishing port where the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean, with a sea-washed church tower and the light that gave birth to Fauvism.

6h37 Village · Occitanie Conques A slate-roofed village hidden in a wooded gorge, built around a Romanesque abbey church, a famous Last Judgement and a golden reliquary.

6h39 Coast · Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Menton The last town on the Riviera before Italy: a Baroque old quarter in ochre and pink, lemon groves, subtropical gardens and Cocteau.

6h56 Mountains · Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Briançon France’s highest town, a star-shaped Vauban fortress of bright façades and rushing gutters, ringed by forts on mountain spurs.

✈ / ⛴ Coast · Corsica Bonifacio A Genoese citadel perched on white limestone cliffs at the southern tip of Corsica, staring across the strait at Sardinia.

✈ / ⛴ Mountains · Corsica Corte The mountain capital of Corsica’s short-lived independent republic: an eagle’s-nest citadel, a student town, and wild gorges at its door.

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