Insight Guides - Insight Guides: Southwest France

How To Use This E-Book

Getting around the e-book

This Insight Guide e-book is designed to give you inspiration for your visit to Southwest France, as well as comprehensive planning advice to make sure you have the best travel experience. The guide begins with our selection of Top Attractions, as well as our Editors Choice categories of activies and experiences. Detailed features on history, people and culture paint a vivid portrait of contemporary life in Southwest France. The extensive Places chapters give a complete guide to all the sights and areas worth visiting. The Travel Tips provide full information on getting around, hotels, activities from to culture to shopping to sport, plus a wealth of practical information to help you plan your trip.

In the Table of Contents and throughout this e-book you will see hyperlinked references. Just tap a hyperlink once to skip to the section you would like to read. Practical information and listings are also hyperlinked, so as long as you have an external connection to the internet, you can tap a link to go directly to the website for more information.

Maps

All key attractions and sights in Southwest France are numbered and cross-referenced to high-quality maps. Wherever you see the reference [map] just tap this to go straight to the related map. You can also double-tap any map for a zoom view.

Images

Youll find hundreds of beautiful high-resolution images that capture the essence of Southwest France. Simply double-tap on an image to see it full-screen.

About Insight Guides

Insight Guides have more than 40 years experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce 400 full-colour titles, in both print and digital form, covering more than 200 destinations across the globe, in a variety of formats to meet your different needs.

Insight Guides are written by local authors who use their on-the-ground experience to provide the very latest information; their local expertise is evident in the extensive historical and cultural background features. All the reviews in Insight Guides are independent; we strive to maintain an impartial view. Our reviews are carefully selected to guide to you the best places to stay and eat, so you can be confident that when we say a restaurant or hotel is special, we really mean it.

Like all Insight Guides , this e-book contains hundreds of beautiful photographs to inspire and inform your travel. We commission most of our own photography, and we strive to capture the essence of a destination using original images that you wont find anywhere else.

2012 Apa Publications (UK) Ltd

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Introduction: Coast to Coast

The best of France is packed into the area between the Massif Central and the Pyrenees, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean

There is nowhere on the map officially called Southwest France but there is a large and fascinating corner of the country characterised by its diversity, vibrant cultures and wealth of concentrated detail in need of a name. It consists of the three regions of Aquitaine, Midi-Pyrnes and Languedoc-Roussillon and its natural borders are mostly well defined: the Atlantic Ocean in the west, and the Mediterranean Sea and River Rhne in the east. The southern extent is unequivocally etched by the peaks of the Pyrenees (which also form the Franco-Spanish frontier). Only to the north is the geographical limit not so clear, as lush river valleys and the uplands that separate them shade into the Massif Central.

Everything within these limits is Southwest France. It covers an area of 114,000 sq km (44,000 sq miles), constituting over a fifth of the total area of France, and has a population of around 7 million, equivalent to 12 percent of the French population. When these figures are put together, the Southwest is seen to have approximately twice as much space per person as the rest of France.

Far from Paris, between two seas and abutting a national border (only fixed in its present form 300 years ago), the Southwest has always beesn a cultural crossroads. Inhabited from the earliest times, it has always been a rich mlange of peoples. Romans, Celts, Visigoths, Arabs, British, Gascons, Occitans, Basques, Catalans and latterly settlers from northern Europe looking for the good life of rural France, have settled and resettled this territory, building up incrementally over generations the fascinating heterogeneity seen today.

The result is a rich mix of beautiful scenery; extraordinary beauty spots; caves painted by prehistoric man; historic towns and medieval villages; energetic modern cities; endless vineyards; fields of sunflowers; thick forests; castles and abbeys; lakes and rivers; and much more.

Get ready to be spoilt for choice. Nameless it may be, but Southwest France lacks nothing else.

Southwest Frances Top 10 Attractions

From art and architecture to festivals and activities, here is a rundown of Frances most spectacular attractions