Audioguides Toulouse

Toulouse is called La Ville Rose, the pink city, for reasons you understand the moment the sun catches the terracotta brick of the old town at six in the morning. The brick is not a stylistic choice but a consequence of what the soil here produces. By the sixteenth century, when the city was running on the blue dye trade from woad plants, Toulouse was one of France's wealthiest cities and its merchants built mansions in that same warm stone. You can walk among those Renaissance facades on streets like Rue de la Dalbade still.

The Basilica of Saint-Sernin is one of the two largest Romanesque churches still standing in Europe, built between the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a pilgrimage stop on the road to Santiago de Compostela.

That building alone justifies arriving by train rather than flying in and driving straight to the Airbus factory. The Canal du Midi, engineered between 1666 and 1681 by Pierre-Paul Riquet, departs the city heading southeast to the Mediterranean and is one of the great feats of seventeenth-century engineering. The towpaths still work as cycling routes.