Curated category
Prefectures in France
- NîmesNimes carries a nickname that stops visitors cold: "the most Roman city outside Italy." Wedged between the Mediterranean Sea and the Cévennes mountain range…
- NiceNice carries a nickname that doubles as a song. Nice la Belle, "Nice the Beautiful," was written by Menica Rondelly and still stands as the city's unofficial…
- LyonLyon sits at the precise point where two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, run together before continuing south toward the Mediterranean.
- GrenobleGrenoble sits at the foot of the French Alps, squeezed between three mountain ranges at the precise spot where the river Drac flows into the Isère.
- StrasbourgStrasbourg sits on the eastern edge of France, pressed against the Rhine, and it has spent two thousand years being fought over, traded away, and reclaimed.
- Valence, DrômeIn August 121 BC, the army of Quintus Fabius Maximus crushed the Allobroges tribe at the Battle of the Isère River. This military victory marked the…
- AjaccioAjaccio sits on the west coast of Corsica, 210 nautical miles southeast of Marseille, curled around a sheltered gulf beneath wooded hills.
- BourgesIn 52 BC, the sixth year of the Gallic Wars, a Gaulish town named Avaricum stood on the banks of the Yèvre river. The inhabitants convinced their council to…
- ToulonToulon sits at the eastern edge of the Gulf of Lion, on the French Riviera, where a natural harbour so protected and deep that it became the beating heart of…
- ParisParis holds 2.04 million people in just 105.4 square kilometres of land. Around that core, a metropolitan population of 13.2 million spreads across the Seine…