Tourist information -
Montpellier
A thousand years of trade and intellectual activity
have made Montpellier a teeming, energetic city. Benjamin of Tudela,
the tireless twelfth-century Jewish traveller, reported its streets
crowded with traders, Christian and Saracen, Arabs from the Maghrib,
merchants from Lombardy, from the kingdom of Rome, from every corner
of Egypt, Greece, Gaul, Spain, Genoa and Pisa. A few hiccups - like
being sold to France in 1349, almost total destruction for its Protestantism
in 1622, and depression in the wine trade in the early years of
this century - have done little to dent this progress. Today it
vies with Toulouse for the title of most dynamic city in the south.
The reputation of its university especially, founded in the thirteenth
century and most famous for its medical school, is a long-standing
one: more than 60,000 students still set the intellectual and cultural
tone of the city - the average age of whose residents is said to
be just 25.
Montpellier's city centre - the old town - is small, compact, architecturally
homogeneous, full of charm and teeming with life, except in July
and August when the students are on holiday and everyone else is
at the beach. And the place is almost entirely pedestrianized, so
you can walk the narrow streets without looking anxiously over your
shoulder.
At the hub of the city's life, joining the old part to its newer
accretions, is place de la Comédie , or "L'Oeuf"
to the initiated. This colossal, oblong square, paved with cream-coloured
marble, has a fountain at its centre and cafés either side.
One end is closed by the Opéra, an ornate nineteenth-century
theatre ; the other opens onto the Esplanade , a beautiful tree-lined
promenade which ends in the Corum concert hall , dug into the hillside
and topped off in pink granite, with splendid views from the roof.
The city's most trumpeted museum, the Musée Fabre (Tues-Fri
9am-5.30pm, Sat & Sun 9.30am-5pm; 25F/?3.81), is close by on
boulevard Sarrail and contains a large and historically important
collection of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century French, Spanish,
Italian, Dutch, Flemish and English painting, including works by
Delacroix, Raphael, Jan van Steen and Veronese.
From the north side of L'Oeuf, rue de la Loge and rue Foch , opened
in the 1880s in Montpellier's own Haussmann-izing spree, slice through
the heart of the old city. Either side of them, a maze of narrow
lanes slopes away to the encircling modern boulevards. Few buildings
survive from before the 1622 siege, but the city's busy bourgeoisie
quickly made up for the loss, proclaiming their financial power
in lots of austere seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions.
Known as "Lou Clapas" (rubble), the area is rapidly being
restored and gentrified. It's a pleasure to wander through and come
upon the secretive little squares like place St-Roch, place St-Ravy
and place de la Canourgue.
First left off rue de la Loge is Grande-Rue Jean-Moulin , where
Moulin, hero of the Resistance, lived at no. 21. To the left, at
no. 32, the present-day Chamber of Commerce is located in one of
the finest eighteenth-century hôtels , the Hôtel St-Côme,
originally built as a demonstration operating theatre for medical
students. On the opposite corner, rue de l'Argenterie forks up to
place Jean-Jaurès . This square is a nodal point in the city's
student life: on fine evenings between 6pm and 7pm you get the impression
that the half of the population not in place de la Comédie
is sitting here and in the adjacent place du Marché-aux-Fleurs.
Through the Gothic doorway of no. 10 of place Jean-Jaurès,
is the so-called palace of the kings of Aragon, who ruled Montpellier
for a stretch in the thirteenth century. Close by is the Halles
Castellane , a graceful, iron-framed market hall.
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