Montpellier

Montpellier is a young southern city ten kilometres from the sea, home to the oldest medical school still teaching anywhere in the world. The Écusson Old Town is a tangle of quiet lanes that opens without warning onto the Charles-de-Gaulle Esplanade, a long promenade lined with plane trees and terraces from morning to night. Seventeenth-century mansions hide grand staircases and courtyards behind doors that give nothing away from the street. At the edge of the esplanade, the Musée Fabre keeps Courbets and Bazilles, the latter a painter born in the city. The beaches start just past the last houses: Petit Travers Beach, a long ribbon of sand between the lagoon and the sea, and La Grande-Motte Beach with its pyramid apartment blocks from the 1960s. Beyond that lie the vineyards, the ramparts of the Medieval City of Aigues-Mortes and the white horses of the Camargue Regional Nature Park.