A thousand years of trade and intellect have made Montpellier a teeming, energetic city. Benjamin of Tudela, the twelfth-century Jewish traveller, reported its streets crowded with traders - Arabs, merchants from Lombardy, and Rome, from every corner of Egypt and Greece. Little has dented this progress and the reputation of its university, founded in the thirteenth century, has shone untarnished.

At the town's hub is place de la Comédie - L'Oeuf to the initiated - a colossal oval square, paved with cream-coloured marble and surrounded by cafés. At one end bulks the Opéra, an enormous, ornate nineteenth-century theatre; the other opens onto the tree-lined promenade of Esplanade and, to the right, the Polygone shopping complex. On the Esplanade, Montpellier's most trumpeted museum, the Musée Fabre (Tues-Fri 9am-5.30pm, Sat & Sun 9.30am-5pm; F20), has a vast collection of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European painting, some Delacroix, Courbet, Impressionists and a few moderns. Behind the Opéra lie the tangled, hilly lanes of Montpellier's oldest quarter, full of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions, a curious mix of chic restoration and squalid disorder. Rue de l'Argenterie forks up to place Jean-Jaurès, with its morning market and cafés, a short walk from two local-history museums on place Petrarque: the Musée du Vieux Montpellier (Tues-Sat 9.30am-noon & 1.30-5pm; free), concentrating on the city's history, and the more interesting Musée du Fougau (Wed & Thurs 3-6/6.30pm; free), dealing with the folk history of Languedoc. On the western edge of the centre, at the end of rue Foch, are the formal gardens of the Promenade du Peyrou and a vainglorious triumphal arch showing Louis XIV-Hercules stomping on the Austrian eagle and the English lion. The Jardin des Plantes, just north of here, with its alleys of exotic trees, is France's oldest botanical garden (Tues-Sun 9am-7pm).