Curated playlist
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 in Southern France, this city in the Occitanie region has been continuously…
- 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 anthem. That affection took root long before anyone set it to music. At Terra…
- LyonLyon sits at the precise point where two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, run together before continuing south toward the Mediterranean. That confluence is not just a geographical fact. It is the reason this city exists at all. Two…
- 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. On the 7th of June 1788, ordinary citizens of this city climbed onto rooftops and pelted…
- 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. In 1988, the city celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of its founding as the…
- Valence, DrômeValence has a saying: "À Valence le Midi commence." At Valence, the south begins. The city sits on the left bank of the Rhône, 100 km south of Lyon, at the place where every route between Paris and the Mediterranean converges. A Roman…
- AjaccioAjaccio sits on the west coast of Corsica, 210 nautical miles southeast of Marseille, curled around a sheltered gulf beneath wooded hills. Its name may trace back to a Greek hero, or to Tuscan words for sheep pens, or to a Byzantine Greek…
- 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 spare the settlement from burning despite a scorched-earth policy by other tribes.…
- 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 France's Mediterranean navy. Today a city of nearly 180,000 people, it is…
- 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 valley. Julius Caesar first wrote of this place in the mid-1st century BC,…