Nouvelle-Aquitaine

The capital, Bordeaux, spreads along a crescent bend of the Garonne, its 18th-century centre of pale limestone a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with the Place de la Bourse and the Miroir d'Eau on the quay and the Cité du Vin, a museum of the wine cultures of the world, by the river to the north. The vineyards begin at the city's edge: the great estates of the Médoc line the Gironde estuary to the north-west, Saint-Émilion stands on its limestone hill among the vines to the east, and Sauternes makes its sweet whites further up the Garonne. The Bassin d'Arcachon and the Dune du Pilat lie under an hour from the city by train.

Sarlat-la-Canéda is the hub of the Périgord Noir, the south-eastern corner of the Dordogne département: a medieval and Renaissance town of golden limestone whose lanes, mansions and small squares survive almost intact. Its market fills the old streets with what the Périgord is known for — foie gras and duck confit, walnuts and walnut oil, cèpes in autumn and black truffles in winter — and the villages around it hold markets of their own. Restaurant menus are built on the same produce, in one of France's distinct regional kitchens, and the wines poured with it come from Bergerac, downstream to the west.

South of Sarlat, the Dordogne river winds between limestone cliffs past a run of villages: La Roque-Gageac, its houses stacked against the cliff above the water; Beynac, beneath its castle; and Domme, a walled bastide on a bluff with a view far up and down the valley. The castles of Beynac and Castelnaud face each other from opposite banks of the river. Canoes are hired in the riverside villages for a paddle downstream beneath the cliffs and the castles, the classic summer outing on this stretch. Rocamadour, a pilgrimage village built up the side of a gorge, lies about an hour's drive east, just across the regional border in the Lot.

North-west of Sarlat, the Vézère valley holds a group of prehistoric sites listed together by UNESCO: rock shelters, decorated caves and the traces of people who lived here in the last Ice Age. The original cave of Lascaux, painted some 17,000 years ago, has been closed to the public for decades to protect its paintings; visitors see Lascaux IV at Montignac, a full-size replica of the cave. At Font-de-Gaume, near Les Eyzies, the painted bison and horses on the walls are the originals. Les Eyzies, the village at the centre of the valley's sites, holds the national museum of prehistory in the cliff above its main street.

From the mouth of the Gironde to the Adour at Bayonne, the Côte d'Argent runs almost straight for more than 200 kilometres: one long beach backed by dunes, and behind the dunes the pine forest of the Landes, planted in the 19th century. The Bassin d'Arcachon breaks the line about halfway down. The Atlantic swell makes this a surfing coast, and its surf towns include Lacanau in the Médoc and Hossegor and Capbreton in the south; a chain of freshwater lakes behind the dunes, among them Hourtin, Lacanau and Cazaux, gives flat water for sailing and swimming.

South of the Adour the French Basque Country begins, and the long sandy coast soon gives way to cliffs and coves. Basque, Euskara, is spoken here alongside French, and most villages have a fronton, the wall against which pelota is played. Biarritz, the resort Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie made fashionable, keeps its grand seafront and its lighthouse on the headland, and surfers ride the swell off its beaches. Bayonne, a few kilometres inland where the Nive meets the Adour, is a town of tall half-timbered houses with painted shutters, a Gothic cathedral and arcaded streets, known for its cured ham and a chocolate-making tradition centuries old; for five days in summer, the Fêtes de Bayonne fill it with crowds dressed in white and red. Saint-Jean-de-Luz, near the Spanish border, keeps a working fishing harbour beside a sheltered sandy bay.

Inland, green hills climb towards the Pyrenees past villages of white houses with red or green timbers, among them Espelette, where strings of red peppers hang to dry on the house fronts in autumn. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, a walled town on the Nive at the foot of the mountains, is the usual starting point of the Camino Francés, the main pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, which climbs from its gate over the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles in Spain. East of the Basque Country lies the Béarn, whose capital, Pau, looks across to the mountains from the Boulevard des Pyrénées and keeps the château where Henri IV was born; south of it, the Ossau and Aspe valleys lead up into the Pyrenees National Park.

North of the Gironde, La Rochelle keeps its old harbour between two medieval towers, and behind the quays the streets of the old town run under stone arcades, with a large aquarium a short walk along the waterfront. Offshore, the Île de Ré and the Île d'Oléron are joined to the mainland by road bridges: flat islands of salt marshes, oyster beds, vineyards and whitewashed villages, with beaches on both their sheltered and their ocean sides and cycle paths running from end to end. On Ré, the port of Saint-Martin-de-Ré is ringed by Vauban's fortifications, part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing.

Between La Rochelle and Niort, the Marais Poitevin is a wide wetland of canals, poplar-shaded waterways and meadows. Its eastern part, the wet marsh around Coulon and Arçais near Niort, is called the Venise Verte, the “Green Venice”, and the way to see it is from a flat-bottomed boat punted through the channels from the village landings, or by bicycle along the towpaths.

Up the Charente from the coast, Cognac gives its name to the brandy distilled from the vineyards around it, and the cognac houses along the river open their cellars to visitors. Poitiers, on the high-speed line north of Bordeaux, is a city of Romanesque churches, among them Notre-Dame-la-Grande, whose west front is covered in carved figures, and the Futuroscope theme park lies just to the north. Further east, Limoges, the main city of the Limousin, is known for its porcelain, shown in the city's national porcelain museum.