Bordeaux

Around 300 BC a Celtic people, the Bituriges Vivisci, settled here and named the town Burdigala. It came under Rome around 60 BC and prospered on the trade in tin and lead, building the amphitheatre whose ruins survive as the Palais Gallien. Vandals, Visigoths and Franks attacked it in turn and Umayyad troops plundered it in 732. Its great medieval revival came with the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry II, soon king of England: for three centuries Bordeaux was English, its wine shipped tax-free across the Channel. It was briefly the capital of the Black Prince's state in 1362–72, and was annexed by France after the Battle of Castillon in 1453.

The 18th century was a second golden age. The Port of the Moon supplied much of Europe with coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton and indigo, becoming France's busiest port, and as many as 5,000 buildings, including the riverfront and the Place de la Bourse, date from this time. Much of that wealth rested on slavery: Bordeaux shipowners deported some 150,000 Africans in around 500 expeditions. The loss of Saint-Domingue, independent as Haiti in 1804, wrecked the port economy, and Wellington's troops took the city in 1814.

In 1870, at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, the French government moved temporarily to Bordeaux. In May and June 1940 the Portuguese consul-general Aristides de Sousa Mendes granted thousands of visas to refugees fleeing the German occupation, and Italian and German submarines later operated from the city's base. Trams arrived in 2003, the Port of the Moon was listed by UNESCO in 2007, and the high-speed line to Paris opened in 2017.

Bordeaux's culture begins with wine. The Bordeaux vineyards cover around 116,000 hectares with 57 appellations and thousands of châteaux, and the 1855 classification still ranks the five First Growths. The city hosts Vinexpo, the world's leading wine fair, and the Cité du Vin, opened in 2016, presents wine as world culture. Red Bordeaux is known in Britain as claret, a reminder of the English centuries.

The city is a "City of Art and History" with 362 listed historic monuments, more than anywhere in France except Paris. Victor Hugo described it as Versailles with Antwerp added, and its 18th-century plan served Haussmann, once prefect here, as a model for Paris. The city is home to the Opéra national de Bordeaux, Arc en rêve was France's first architecture centre, and festivals include the European Short Film Festival every March. The city has also faced its slave-trading past, with rooms in the Musée d'Aquitaine, a plaque on the quays and a 2019 statue of Modeste Testas, a woman enslaved by Bordeaux merchants.

Sport is followed closely. Girondins de Bordeaux, six-time French football champions, now play in the sixth tier after administrative relegations in 2024 and 2026, while Union Bordeaux Bègles plays rugby in the Top 14. The riverside skate park is busy with young riders, and in the 1950s a Formula One race looped around the Quinconces.

About 268,000 people lived in the city in 2023, within a small municipal territory of 49 square kilometres, and about 1.43 million in the metropolitan area, the sixth largest in France. The Bordeaux Métropole of 28 municipalities had about 854,000 residents. More than 130,000 students study in the metropolis, many on one of Europe's largest university campuses.

The economy goes well beyond wine. Bordeaux is a hub of aerospace and defence, with Dassault Aviation, ArianeGroup, Safran and Thales and some 15,000 people in the aeronautics industry, and the Laser Mégajoule, one of the most powerful lasers in the world, is nearby. Services, administration, business tourism and congresses are major employers.

Most residents live outside the historic core, in the 19th-century streets of the old faubourgs, in Caudéran, annexed in 1965, and across the sprawling suburbs, and commuting by public transport takes about 51 minutes a day on average. Former docks and rail yards at the Bassins à flot, the Bastide and around the Gare Saint-Jean are being turned into new districts. Politics have shifted: in 2020 an ecologist, Pierre Hurmic, ended 73 years of centre-right rule, and Thomas Cazenave was elected mayor in 2026.

Bordeaux's sweet specialities include the canelé, a small fluted cake whose exact origin is told in several competing stories, as well as bouchons au chocolat, croquants bordelais and sarments du Médoc. Among the savoury dishes are entrecôte à la bordelaise, rib steak in the local style; lamproie à la bordelaise, lamprey in the Bordeaux manner; and grenier médocain, a speciality of the Médoc.

Markets are central to eating here. The Marché des Capucins, with origins in the 18th century, remained the city's main retail market after the wholesale trade moved to Bordeaux-Brienne in 1963. Saint-Michel, around the basilica, has many small international and budget restaurants, and the Chartrons quays hold cafés and wine bars.

Wine is the city's constant companion. Red Bordeaux is generally blended from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and Malbec, while white Bordeaux uses Sauvignon Blanc, Sémillon and Muscadelle, and Sauternes, in the Graves, makes intensely sweet white wines such as Château d'Yquem. The region produces about 960 million bottles a year, from everyday wine to some of the most expensive bottles in the world.