North Travel Video Guide

North Travel Itinerary

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When conjuring up exotic holiday locations, you're unlikely to light upon the north of France. Even among the French, the most enthusiastic tourists of their own country, it has few adherents. Artois and Flanders include the most heavily industrialized parts of the country, while across the wheat fields of the more sparsely populated regions of Picardy and Champagne a few drops of rain are all that is required for total gloom to descend. It is likely, however, that you'll arrive and leave France via this region, and there are reasons to stop within easy reach of the Channel ports - of which Boulogne is by far the most appealing.

The north of France has been on the path of various invaders into the country, from northern Europe as well as from Britain, and the events that have taken place in Flanders, Artois and Picardy have shaped French history. The bloodiest battles were those of World War I, above all the Battle of the Somme , which took place north of Amiens, and Vimy Ridge , near Arras, where the trenches have been preserved in perpetuity. Throughout the north, but particularly around the villages of the Somme, monuments and cemeteries are powerful reminders of the devastating human wastage of those years.

Picardy boasts two of France's finest cathedrals, at Amiens and Laon . Further south, the maisons , vineyards and produce of the Champagne region are the main draw, for which the best bases are Epernay and Reims , the latter with another fine cathedral. Other attractions include the bird sanctuary of Marquenterre ; the wooded wilderness of the Ardennes ; industrial archeology in the coalfields around Douai , where Zola's Germinal was set; the great medieval castle of Coucy-le-Chateau ; and the battle sites of the Middle Ages - Agincourt and Crecy - whose names are so familiar in the

history of Anglo-French rivalry.

Though the past is not forgotten, the present life of the region does not feed on it. In city centres from Lille to Troyes , you'll find your fill of food, culture and entertainment in the company of locals similarly intent on having a good time; and in addition to the more obvious pleasures of the Champagne region, there's the possibility of finding relatively lucrative employment during the harvest season towards the end of September.

Your Tips For North

• 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
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  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
  

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

• 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
  

• 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
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  Languedoc is more an idea than a geographical entity. - 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
  

• 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
  

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

• 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
  

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

• Massif Central France Travel Videos
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  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
  

• 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
  

• 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