5 Days in Bordeaux

Start where every postcard of Bordeaux starts. The Place de la Bourse was built between 1730 and 1775 by the royal architect Jacques Gabriel and then his son Ange-Jacques, as a showpiece for Louis XV: two grand buildings, the stock exchange and the customs house, opening onto the river instead of closing around a square. It was the first sign of the city Bordeaux became in the 18th century, when it was the busiest port in France.

In front of it is the Miroir d'eau, laid out in 2006 as part of the riverside park by the landscape architect Michel Corajoud. It's a granite slab of about 3,450 m² that floods with 2 cm of water, drains, then fills with mist, in a cycle of a few minutes. When it's full, the whole square sits upside down at your feet. Take your shoes off and walk in, everyone does. Come back after dark too, when the buildings are lit.

Walk one block back from the river into Saint-Pierre, the oldest part of Bordeaux, where the Roman town of Burdigala stood. The streets here are the narrowest in the city, with the Gothic church of Saint-Pierre in the middle and the Place du Parlement just north of it, a small 18th-century square of cafés around a fountain that's at its best with a coffee in the late morning.

On the quay side stands the Porte Cailhau, a 35 m gate built in 1493-96 that looks more like a castle tower in a fairy tale than a city gate. It was put up to celebrate the victory of King Charles VIII at Fornovo in Italy, and you can climb it for a small exhibition on the medieval city and a view along the river.

Ten minutes south, at the end of rue Saint-James, is the Grosse Cloche, the "big bell". It's the 15th-century belfry of Bordeaux's old town hall and one of the few medieval gates left in the city, with two conical towers and a bell of nearly 8 tonnes, cast in 1775, hanging between them. It's still rung for the big public holidays and at noon on the first Sunday of every month.

The street that runs through it was part of the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, which is also why the cathedral you'll see this afternoon, Saint-Michel and the Basilique Saint-Seurin are UNESCO sites. Just west is the Rue Sainte-Catherine, a 1.2 km pedestrian shopping street, one of the longest in Europe and packed on Saturday afternoons.

After lunch, walk five minutes west to the Musée d'Aquitaine, the museum of the city and its region from prehistory to today. It has the Venus of Laussel, a carved woman holding a horn made about 25,000 years ago, a good Roman section, and then the part every visitor should see: the rooms on Bordeaux, the Atlantic trade and slavery, opened in 2009.

The 18th-century golden age you'll see all over town was built partly on the slave trade and on sugar and coffee grown by enslaved people in the Caribbean, above all in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Bordeaux ships carried somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 Africans across the Atlantic in about 500 voyages. The city was slow to say so, and these rooms were its first serious attempt. They're clear, honest and essential to understanding what you're looking at outside.

The Cathédrale Saint-André is where, in 1137, the teenage Eleanor of Aquitaine married the future Louis VII of France. The marriage was annulled 15 years later, and within weeks she had married Henry Plantagenet, soon to be King of England, which is how Bordeaux and its wine ended up English for three centuries. The cathedral is mostly Gothic, long and a little lopsided, and its Royal Door on the north side is one of the best pieces of medieval carving in the city.

Its bell tower stands apart, across the square, because the ground under the cathedral was too soft to carry the weight and the bells' vibration. The Tour Pey-Berland was begun in 1440, and a gilded Virgin was put on top in 1863. Climb the 230-odd steps to the terraces, the highest at 50 m, for the best view of the old town's rooftops and the river.

Head back to the river for sunset on the Pont de Pierre, the first bridge ever built across the Garonne at Bordeaux. Napoleon ordered it, and it was finished in 1822, long after he had gone. Locals will tell you it has 17 arches because "Napoléon Bonaparte" has 17 letters. It makes a good story and nobody has ever proved it was planned. Cars have been banned since 2017, so it's now trams, bikes and people.

Walk to the middle and turn around. The whole curve of 18th-century facades is in front of you, glowing as the sun drops behind them, with the spire of Saint-Michel to the left. That view is the reason UNESCO listed the city.

For the first dinner, order the city's own dish: entrecôte à la bordelaise, a rib steak with a sauce of red wine, shallots and bone marrow, ideally grilled over vine cuttings (sarments). It's simple, heavy and exactly what a glass of young Bordeaux was made for.

La Brasserie Bordelaise on rue Saint-Rémi, near the Place de la Bourse, is a lively, long-running place for it. You'll also see a queue outside L'Entrecôte on the Cours du XXX Juillet. It's an institution, but it serves one dish with its own "secret sauce", not a real bordelaise, and doesn't take bookings.

The Grand Théâtre, opened in 1780, is Victor Louis's masterpiece and the clearest picture of how rich Bordeaux was before the Revolution. Twelve Corinthian columns carry twelve statues along the roof, the nine Muses and three goddesses, and its grand staircase inspired Charles Garnier when he designed the Paris Opera a century later.

Around it is the Golden Triangle, the grid of shopping streets between the Cours de l'Intendance, the Cours Clemenceau and the Allées de Tourny, all built in the same pale stone. Look up at the carved faces (mascarons) over the doors and windows. The city has thousands of them, and no two are the same.

A few minutes north is the Esplanade des Quinconces, one of the largest squares in Europe, laid out where a royal fortress stood until the 1820s. At the river end is the Monument aux Girondins, a tall column with a fountain of bronze horses, built in 1894-1902 for the Girondin deputies executed in the Terror. In 1943 the Vichy authorities took the bronzes down to melt them. They were never melted, and they came back in 1983.

On the quay facing the square, in front of the old maritime exchange, stands a statue of Modeste Testas, a woman born in Africa and enslaved by two Bordeaux brothers on their plantation in Saint-Domingue. It was unveiled in 2019, one of the city's first public memorials to the slave trade. Then walk ten minutes west to the Jardin Public, laid out in 1746, for a quiet loop around its pond. The arches of the Palais Gallien, the only remains of Roman Burdigala's amphitheater from around 200 AD, are a few blocks further on.

The Chartrons, just north of the center, is where the wine merchants (négociants) lived and worked from the 17th century on, many of them Dutch, German, Irish and English. Their wine was aged in long cellars behind the quay and loaded straight onto ships. Today it's the city's favorite neighborhood for a slow lunch: antique shops and bistros along rue Notre-Dame, and the old covered market hall of the Chartrons at the north end.

After lunch, the Musée du Vin et du Négoce shows one of those merchant cellars with a tasting at the end, and the CAPC contemporary art museum fills a huge 1824 warehouse built for goods from the colonies. Either makes a good half hour if you have time before the next stop.

From the Chartrons, take tram B to Bassins à flot or walk 20 minutes to the Base sous-marine, a colossal concrete bunker that the German navy built in 1941-43 for its own U-boats and those of fascist Italy. It was far too massive to knock down after the war, so the city lived with it, and since 2020 part of its flooded submarine pens has been the Bassins des Lumières, one of the world's largest digital art centers.

Painters' works are projected onto the walls and reflected in the black water below, while you walk the walkways between the basins. The shows change every year or so, and the building is the star whatever is on.

Then walk 15 minutes across the docks to La Cité du Vin, opened in 2016 on the riverbank by the docks. The 55 m building by the architects XTU is meant to look like wine swirling in a glass, and inside it's less a museum of Bordeaux than of wine everywhere: how it's made, traded, drunk and argued about in Georgia, China, Argentina and the Roman Empire, with a lot of screens and smells along the way.

The ticket ends with a glass in the Belvédère on the 8th floor, with a view down the river to the lift bridge. It's an excellent first lesson before two days in the vineyards.

Have dinner next door at the Halles de Bacalan, a food hall of stalls with oysters, charcuterie, cheese and wine by the glass at long shared tables. It's casual and a good place to try several things at once.

Afterwards, step out to the river for the Pont Jacques Chaban-Delmas, opened in 2013. Its central span, 110 m long, rises straight up between four tall towers to let big ships and sailing boats into the city, the longest lift span of its kind in Europe, and it's lit up at night.

Saint-Émilion takes its name from a Breton monk who lived as a hermit in a cave here in the 8th century. The village grew on top of the limestone his followers dug into, and the stone for every house was quarried from underneath, which left the hill full of tunnels and cellars. In 1999 its whole wine landscape became the first vineyard ever listed by UNESCO.

The extraordinary thing is the church. Between the 11th and 12th centuries, the monks carved an entire church out of the rock, nave, pillars and all, the largest underground church in Europe. Above ground you only see its bell tower and spire, the one in the photo. It can only be visited on a guided tour from the tourist office on the Place des Créneaux, and the tour also takes in the hermit's cave and the catacombs.

Spend the rest of the morning on foot. The streets drop so steeply that some are stairs (the locals call them tertres), lined with wine shops on every corner. Climb the Tour du Roy, a 13th-century keep, for the view of roofs and vines in every direction, and walk to the ruined cloister of the Cordeliers, where sparkling wine is now made and served in the garden.

It's busy with visitors from late morning, and some shops exist only to sell wine to tourists at the wrong price. The village is still beautiful, especially early and late in the day.

Have a long lunch on one of the terraces around the Place du Marché, with a glass of the local red. Saint-Émilion is right-bank Bordeaux, where the soft, plummy Merlot leads instead of the Cabernet Sauvignon of the Médoc, and its wines have their own classification, revised about every ten years. The 2022 edition caused a row when three of the most famous names, Ausone, Cheval Blanc and Angélus, walked out of it.

For dessert, buy a box of the town's macarons. Not the colored Parisian kind but plain, chewy almond biscuits baked on paper, a recipe that tradition says the Ursuline nuns brought here in the 17th century.

The best part of a day here is walking out of the village into the vines. Dozens of châteaux sit within a half-hour walk or a short taxi ride, and many of the classified ones take visitors for a tour of the cellars and a tasting, usually by appointment. The tourist office lists which ones are open that day and can book for you.

A visit shows you the part the Cité du Vin can't: rows of new oak barrels, the smell of fermenting grapes in September and October, and someone whose family has been making wine on the same slope for generations. If you want more, Pomerol, home of some of the world's most expensive Merlot, is a few kilometers north.

Back in Bordeaux, finish at the Bar à Vin of the Bordeaux wine council (CIVB), in an 18th-century mansion on the Cours du XXX Juillet. It serves wines from every corner of the region by the glass at very fair prices, poured by people who can explain the difference between what you drank today and what you'll drink in the Médoc. It's a good place to work out what you actually like before you buy any bottles.

Arcachon was invented in the 1860s by the Pereire brothers, two Bordeaux-born bankers who had built the railway here and needed people to fill the trains. On the pine-covered hill behind the beach they laid out the Ville d'Hiver, the "winter town", for wealthy patients with tuberculosis, who came to breathe the pine-scented air.

Walk up from the station into its winding streets of more than 300 villas, each in a different fantasy style: Swiss chalets, Moorish arches, Gothic turrets, painted wooden balconies. The Parc Mauresque at the top has a view over the town and the bay.

Walk down to the seafront and the Jetée Thiers pier, where the UBA boats leave. Arcachon Bay is an almost enclosed lagoon that fills and empties with the tide, and it's one of the main oyster nurseries in Europe: from the water you see rows of oyster parks and stakes, and the pale strip of the dune to the south.

The classic trip goes around the Île aux Oiseaux, a bird island in the middle of the bay, to see the cabanes tchanquées, two huts on stilts that have become the symbol of the bay. Other boats cross to Cap Ferret in about half an hour, if you'd rather spend the day there (see If You Have More Time). Off-season the boats run less often, and the island tour not every day, so check the UBA timetable.

On the way to the dune, stop at Le Moulleau, Arcachon's old fishing quarter, for lunch, or eat at one of the oyster farmers' huts around the bay. Order a dozen local oysters, raw with lemon or shallot vinegar, with bread, salted butter and a glass of cold white Entre-Deux-Mers. Add a few crépinettes, small hot pork sausages, to eat between oysters. It sounds odd and it works.

Oysters are good all year now, but locals still say they're best in the months with an "r" in them, from September to April.

The Dune du Pilat is the highest sand dune in Europe, about 100-110 m high and almost 3 km long, a wall of sand between the pine forest of the Landes and the Atlantic. It moves a few meters inland every year, burying the trees as it goes, and its height changes with the winter storms.

It's a stiff climb up loose sand (in summer a staircase is usually put in), and then the top opens up completely: ocean on one side, forest to the horizon on the other, the tip of Cap Ferret and the sandbanks of the bay below. Stay for sunset, when the sand turns orange, then walk down and catch the bus or a taxi back to Arcachon station.

The Capucins is the city's main covered market, the "belly of Bordeaux", and on Saturday morning it turns into a party. Locals do their shopping, then stand at the oyster bars with a dozen and a glass of white wine at 10am as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Do the same. Chez Jean-Mi is the best-known of the oyster counters, and the queue moves fast.

Then walk around: cheese, charcuterie, the season's cèpes in autumn, canelés, and stalls of Spanish and Portuguese food that show who has settled in this part of town.

Five minutes north is Saint-Michel, the most mixed and lived-in neighborhood in the center, with North African grocers, cheap cafés and a flea market around the basilica. The Flamboyant Gothic Basilique Saint-Michel has a separate bell tower, the Flèche, built in 1472-92. A storm wrecked its spire in 1768, and the one rebuilt in the 1860s brought it to 114 m, one of the tallest in France.

After more than five years of works, the Flèche reopened to visitors in June 2026. Climb the 230 steps for the best view in the city, over the river, the rooftops of the old town and the bridges, then come down for a coffee on the square.

Cross the Pont de Pierre or take Le Bato to La Bastide, the right bank, which was mostly docks, rail yards and barracks until recently. The best of it is Darwin, in the old Niel barracks: an indoor skatepark, walls covered in graffiti, an organic restaurant and grocery, a bar, start-ups and co-working spaces. It's the closest thing Bordeaux has to an alternative scene, and it has survived years of disputes with the developers of the new district around it.

Have lunch or a drink there, then wander along the quay. The new districts around it are full of cranes, and you'll see how far the city is spreading east.

For your last sunset, walk south along the right bank into the Parc aux Angéliques, a long riverside park of meadows and trees. This is where Bordeaux looks best: the whole 18th-century riverfront, the Place de la Bourse and the spires laid out across the water, turning gold and then lighting up. Bring a bottle from the Capucins and do what the locals do on a summer evening.

Cross back over the Pont de Pierre for the last dinner in Saint-Pierre, around the Place du Parlement or the Place Saint-Pierre, where the terraces fill up on warm nights. Order the things you haven't had yet: cèpes à la bordelaise in autumn, duck from the southwest, a plate of local cheese. For the full southwest feast, book La Tupina near Saint-Michel, which cooks over an open hearth. Then pick a bottle from somewhere you didn't visit, a Pessac-Léognan red or a Sauternes with dessert, and take it slowly.