France Travel Video Guide

France Travel Itinerary

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The sheer physical diversity of France would be hard to exhaust in a lifetime of visits. The landscapes range from the fretted coasts of Brittany to the limestone hills of Provence, the canyons of the Pyrenees and the half-moon bays of Corsica, from the lushly wooded valleys of the Dordogne to the glaciated peaks of the Alps. Each region looks and feels different, has its own style of architecture, its characteristic food and often its own patois or dialect. Though the French word pays is the term for a whole country, local people frequently refer to their own immediate vicinity as mon pays - my country - and to a person from another town as a foreigner. This strong sense of regional identity, often expressed in the form of active separatist movements, as in Brittany and Corsica, has persisted over centuries in the teeth o centralized administrative control from Paris.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the French countryside is the sense of space. There are huge tracts of woodland and undeveloped land without a house in sight. Industrialization came relatively late, and the country remains very rural. Away from the main urban centres, hundreds of towns and villages have changed only slowly and organically, their old houses and streets intact, as much a part of the natural landscape as the rivers, hills and fields.

The nation's legacy of history and culture is so widely dispersed across the land that even if you were to confine your traveling to one particular region you would still have a powerful sense of the past without having to seek out major sights. With its wealth of local detail, France is an ideal country for dawdling; there is always something to catch the eye and gratify the senses, whether you are meandering down a lane, picnicking by a slow, green river, or sipping Pernod in a village cafe. There is also endless scope for all kinds of outdoor activities, from walking, canoeing and cycling to the more expensive pleasures of skiing and sailing.

If you need more than urban stimuli to activate the pleasure buds - clubs, shops, fashion, movies, music, hanging out with the beautiful and famous - then the great cities provide them in abundance. Paris, of course, is an outstanding cultural centre, with its stunting contemporary buildings and atmospheric back streets, its art and its ethnic diversity. And the great provincial cities like Lille and Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille and Nice vie with the capital and each other, like the city-states of old, for prestige in the arts, ascendancy in sport and innovation in urban transport.

For a thousand years and more, France has been at the cutting edge of European development, and the legacy of this wealth, energy and experience is everywhere evident in the astonishing variety of things to see: from the Gothic cathedrals of the north to the Romanesque churches of the centre and west, the chateaux of the Loire, the Roman monuments of the south, the ruined castles of the English and the Cathars and the Dordogne's prehistoric cave-paintings. If not all the legacy is so tangible - the literature, music and ideas of the 1789 Revolution, for example - much has been recuperated and illustrated in museums and galleries across the nation, from colonial history to fishing techniques, aeroplane design to textiles, migrant shepherds to manicure, battlefields and coalmines.

Many of the museums are models of clarity and modern design. Among those that the French do best are museums devoted to local arts, crafts and customs like the Musee National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris and the Musee Dauphinois in Grenoble. But inevitably first place must go to the fabulous collections of fine art, many of which are in Paris, for the simple reason that the city has nurtured so many of the finest creative artists of the last hundred years, both French, Monet and Matisse for example, and foreign, such as Picasso and Van Gogh.

If you are quite untroubled by a need to improve your mind in the contemplation of old stones and works of art, France is equally well endowed to satisfy to satisfy the grosser appetites. The French have made a high art of daily life: eating, drinking, dressing, moving and simply being. The Pleasures of the palate run from the simplest picnic of crusty baguette, ham and cheese washed down by an inexpensive red wine through what must be the most elaborate takeaway food in the world, available from practically every

charcuterie; such basis regional dishes as cassoulet; the liver-destroying riches of Perigord and Burgundy cuisine; the fruits of the sea; extravagant pastries and ice-cream cakes; to the trance-inducing refinements - and prices - of the great chefs. And there are wines to match, at all prices, and not just feel inadequate in the face of all this choice, never be afraid to ask advice, for most French people are true devotees, ever ready to explain the arcane mysteries to the uninitiated.

Your Tips For France

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• Loire France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The density of chateaux and all their great Renaissance intrigues and associations can prove quite intimidating, but if you pick your castles selectively, rid yourself of a sense of duty to guided tours and spend days on river banks with supplies of cheese, fruit and white Loire wines, the Loire can be one of the most enjoyable of all French regions. - France
  

• Alsace-Lorraine and the Jura mountains France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  France's eastern frontier provinces, Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comte , where the Jura mountains lie, have had a complex and tumultuous history. - France
  

• Burgundy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Peaceful, rural Burgundy is one of the most prosperous regions in modern France, but for centuries its powerful dukes remained independent of the French crown. - France
  

• Cote dAzur France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The Cote d'Azur polarizes opinions like few other places in France. - France
  

• Massif Central France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  One of the loveliest spots on earth ? a country without roads, without guides, without any facilities for locomotion, where every discovery must be conquered at the price of danger or fatigue ? a soil cut up with deep ravines, crossed in every way by lofty walls of lava, and furrowed by numerous torrents . - France
  

• Rhone valley and Provence France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Of all the areas of France, Provence is the most irresistible. - France
  

• North France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  When conjuring up exotic holiday locations, you're unlikely to light upon the north of France. - France
  

• Languedoc France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Languedoc is more an idea than a geographical entity. - France
  

• Brittany France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  No one area - and certainly no one city or town - in Brittany encapsulates the character of the province; that lies in its people and in its geographical unity. - France
  

• Corsica France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Around one-and-three-quarter million people visit Corsica each year, drawn by a climate that's mild even in winter and by some of the most astonishingly diverse landscapes in Europe. - France
  

• Poitou-Charentes and the Atlantic Coast France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  News-stands selling Sud-Ouest remind you where you are: this is not the Mediterranean, certainly, but in summer the quality of the light, the warm air, the fields of sunflowers and the shuttered siesta-silence of the farmhouses give you the first exciting promises of the south. - France
  

• Paris France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  It's little wonder that so many wistful songs have been penned over the years about France's capital, Paris . - France
  

• Pyrenees France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Basque-speaking, wet and green in the west; craggy, snowy, Gascon-influenced in the middle; dry, Mediterranean and Catalan-speaking in the east - the Pyrenees are physically beautiful, culturally varied and considerably less developed than the Alps. - France
  

• Dordogne Limousin and Lot France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The land covered in this section forms a rough oval bordered to the east by the uplands of the Massif Central and to the west by the Atlantic plains. - France
  

• Alps France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Rousseau wrote in his Confessions , "I need torrents, rocks, pine trees, dark forests, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices at my elbow to give me a good fright", and he certainly found what he was looking for in the Alps . - France
  

• Normandy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Though now firmly incorporated into the French mainstream, the seaboard province of Normandy has a history of prosperous independence as one of the crucial powers of medieval Europe. - France