Montpellier in 4 days

The large pedestrian square between the medieval centre and the 19th-century city, closed by the 1888 opera house with the Three Graces fountain in front.

A fine art museum founded in 1825, from 17th-century Flemish and Dutch painting to a major Courbet collection and Soulages works given by the artist.

A former monastery chapel with a porch on two huge conical pillars, beside the medical school descended from one founded in 1220.

France's oldest botanical garden, created in 1593 under Henri IV to teach medical botany, with its original terraces, 19th-century glasshouses and orangery.

A two-level terrace above the city, with a triumphal arch and Louis XIV on horseback, ending at a water tower fed by a two-tier aqueduct.

Ricardo Bofill's kilometre of neoclassical squares in precast concrete, begun in the late 1970s, where the columns and pediments front social housing and offices.

The oldest of Montpellier's country houses, begun in 1696 among vineyards, with a hanging staircase, Flemish tapestries and formal gardens leading into an English park.

A massive 12th-century Romanesque church alone among vines, pines and lagoons on a former island, seat of a bishopric for nearly a thousand years.