Bordeaux’s Museum Quarter, Bordeaux, France

The Travel Pages visits Bordeaux’s Museum Quarter, home to three excellent museums, the Cathédrale St-André and the Tour Pey-Berland, for great city views.

Bordeaux’s Museum Quarter is just a few minutes’ walk south from the city centre and you can easily spend all day there, as we did. Avoid Mondays or Tuesdays, if you can, when one or other of the museums is closed.

Walk south from the Golden Triangle and you arrive at the city’s cathedral, and around it a clutch of museums. It’s an area that can easily be explored in a day, as none of the museums is huge. The best of them is the Musée d’Aquitaine, which tells the story of Bordeaux and the surrounding areas from prehistoric times onwards.

One display reconstructs an archaeological dig, and is very atmospheric. There are Roman mosaics and coins, medieval mosaics, and the vast stone frame of a 16th-century rose window. It’s an excellent collection, very stylishly displayed in places.

By comparison the Musée des Beaux-Arts is disappointing for a city the size of Bordeaux. Much of the building is given over to temporary exhibitions, which means that the core collection is limited to a few rooms in one wing, and only a fraction of the 3000 works are on display at any one time. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).