Saint-Etienne Audio Tours

Saint-Etienne built its wealth on coal and weaponry: a national arms factory was established here in the 16th century, and the French state manufactured military rifles on this site for four hundred years. The first steel mill in France was installed near the city after the Napoleonic Wars, and by the 19th century Saint-Etienne was producing coal, steel, bicycles, and ribbons in roughly equal abundance, making it one of France's most productive industrial cities and one of its most polluted. The factories have not all been erased; the industrial landscape remains, being slowly converted into the raw material for a different kind of city.

The transition from industrial to creative city has been managed with unusual intelligence.

La Cite du design, opened in 2009 on the site of the former arms factory, became the center of a biennial international design festival that now ranks among the world's most significant in the field. In 2010, Saint-Etienne joined the UNESCO Creative Cities network in the design category. The football club AS Saint-Etienne, known as Les Verts (The Greens), won ten French league titles mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard, nicknamed le Chaudron (the cauldron), remains one of the loudest and most atmospheric grounds in French football.