Car Hire in Toulouse, France
Toulouse, featuring its attractive historic centre, belongs to the most vivid and metropolitan provincial cities in France. This can be an improvement that has taken place since the war, under the guidance of the French state, which has poured in money to help make Toulouse the think-tank of high-tech industry and also a sort of premier trans-national Euro-ville. Always an aviation centre - St-Exupéry and Mermoz flew out from here about their pioneering airmail flights over Africa plus the Atlantic in the 1920s - Toulouse is currently home to Aérospatiale, the driving force behind Concorde, Airbus and also the Ariane space rocket. The national Space Centre, the European shuttle programme, the leading aeronautical schools, the frontier-pushing electronics industry... it is actually happening in Toulouse, whose 110,000 students make it second only to Paris as a university centre. Yet, not to the burgeoning suburbs of factories, labs, shopping and housing complexes that every one of these people go for their entertainment, but to the old Ville Rose - pink not just in its brickwork, but also in its politics.
This isn't the first flush of pre-eminence for Toulouse. From the 10th to the 13th centuries the counts of Toulouse controlled most of southern France. They managed some of the most resplendent court in the land, renowned especially for its troubadours, the poets of courtly love, whose work motivated Petrarch, Dante and Chaucer; and therefore, the entire course of European poetry. Until, that is, the arrival of the hungry northern French nobles of the Albigensian Crusade; in 1271 when Toulouse became crown property
The region of the city you might want to see forms a rough hexagon clamped round a bend in the wide, brown River Garonne and confined in a ring of inner nineteenth-century boulevards - Strasbourg, Carnot, Jules-Guesde among others. An outer ring enclosing these is created by the Canal du Midi, which here joins the Garonne heading from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
Old Toulouse is properly quartered by two nineteenth-century streets: the long shopping street, rue d'Alsace-Lorraine/rue du Languedoc, which runs north-south; and rue de Metz, which runs east-west onto the Pont-Neuf and over the Garonne. It is all very compact and easily walkable.
In addition to the typical pleasure of wandering the streets, there are three superb museums and several real architectural treasures in the churches of St-Sernin and Les Jacobins and in the remarkable Renaissance town houses - hôtels particuliers - of the merchants who grew rich on the woad-dye trade. This formed the foundation of the city's economy from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, when the arrival of indigo from the Indian colonies wiped it out.
Place du Capitole is the centre of gravity for the city's social life. Its smart cafés throng with individuals at lunchtime and then in the early evening when the dying sun flushes the pink facade of the big town hall opposite. Here is the scene of a mammoth Wednesday market for food, clothes and junk, and also a smaller organic foods market on Tuesday and Saturday mornings. From place du Capitole, a labyrinth of narrow medieval streets radiates out to the town's several other squares, including the place Wilson, the more intimate place St-Georges, this wonderful triangular place de la Trinité and place St-étienne in front of the cathedral.
For green space, you have to head for the sunny banks of the Garonne or perhaps the beautiful formal gardens of the Grand-Rond and Jardin des Plantes in the southeast corner of the centre. A less obvious but interesting alternative is the towpath of the Canal du Midi; the best place to join it is a short walk southeast of the Jardin des Plantes, by the neo-Moorish pavilion of the Georges-Labit museum, which houses an exceptional collection of Egyptian and Oriental art.
Ljao/jan/1v21
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