Get Quartz in your inbox

Free daily briefing on global business news.

The 7 best places to visit in central France, ranked

From Bourges' Gothic cathedral to a town with a tapestry workshop and surprising ties to Scotland, seven central France detours worth taking

Credit: Office de Tourisme Intercommunal Sauldre et Solagne

Most visitors to France funnel toward the same handful of destinations, filling car tanks or batteries at motorway service stations on the way to Paris, the Atlantic coast, or the Mediterranean, or watching the countryside blur past from the window of a high-speed train. This efficiency comes at a cost, since the fastest route between two famous cities almost never passes through the small towns that hold some of the country’s most surprising history. A traveler who never leaves the motorway network sees a version of France built almost entirely around its biggest names, missing the quieter towns that fill in the country’s actual texture.

Central France rewards exactly the opposite approach. The region’s back roads stay remarkably well maintained even far from any major city, making a slower trip by car or bicycle genuinely practical rather than a romantic inconvenience. Small towns here hold Gothic cathedrals, centuries-old tapestry workshops, and historical connections to Scotland or to major French writers that a traveler racing toward the coast would never discover. The trade-off is time, not difficulty, since these towns reward a traveler willing to slow down far more than they reward a rigid, checklist-driven itinerary, and none of the detours described below require specialized skills or equipment beyond a car, a bicycle, or a willingness to change trains once along the way.

The 7 places below appear in Lonely Planet, covering towns across central France running roughly north to south and west to east, each one built around a distinct piece of history, craft, or culture. Each entry focuses on what makes that particular town worth the detour, along with practical notes on getting there from the region’s natural starting point in Bourges, since most of these towns connect back to Bourges more easily than they connect to each other directly.

1. Bourges anchors central France in Gothic grandeur

Snap Wander / Unsplash

Bourges has served as an important urban hub for more than 2,000 years, and its selection as the 2028 European Capital of Culture makes it a natural base for exploring the rest of central France. Medieval streets lined with half-timbered houses fill the historic center, all sitting beneath the skyline dominated by the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Cathédrale St-Étienne, a transept-free masterpiece of Gothic architecture that has survived with remarkably few modifications since its construction, its 13th- and 14th-century stained glass windows still strikingly vivid.

A ten-minute walk from the cathedral leads to the early 15th-century Palace of Jacques Coeur, one of the rare surviving examples of French civilian Gothic architecture. The palace stands nearly empty of furniture today, but its stone carvings more than make up for the bare rooms, with intricate and often playful sculptures decorating the chimneys, windows, doors, and staircases throughout the building. The main facade carries a small mystery of its own, with bas-relief portraits of Jacques Coeur and his wife positioned on opposite balconies, each one facing pointedly away from the other.

A twenty-minute walk in a different direction leads away from the city’s architecture entirely and into 135 hectares of market gardens, still tended by the families who own them and threaded through with canals and streams. Visitors can walk the paths between the plots or take a boat down the waterways themselves, turning what began as a tour of Gothic architecture into an afternoon spent among working gardens instead.

Reaching Bourges from Paris takes about two hours by train, with four direct services running each day for around €43 one way, and 12 additional trains available with a change in Orléans for roughly the same fare. This level of rail access makes Bourges an easy first stop for a trip built around the towns further south and east, since travelers can arrive without a car and still reach most destinations on this list from there.

2. Aubigny-sur-Nère waves a Scottish flag in France

Credit: Ville d'Aubigny-sur-Nère

Aubigny-sur-Nère carries the motto “la cité des Stewarts,” and the town backs up that claim with........

© Quartz