Paris does not need an introduction and resists every attempt to write one. It is the most written-about, photographed, painted, filmed and debated city in the history of Western civilisation, and it remains — despite the saturation of representation, despite the tourist crowds at the Eiffel Tower, despite the eye-watering apartment prices — genuinely extraordinary in the way that only places built with absolute conviction about what matters can be. The city was remade in the 1850s–1870s by Baron Haussmann under Napoleon III with a specific and ruthless vision: wide boulevards that destroyed the medieval labyrinth but created the most legible and most beautiful large-scale urban plan ever executed. The result is the Paris we walk through today: a city where the relationship between street, façade, square and park has been so precisely calibrated that almost every view from almost every corner contains the elements of a composition.

The Louvre is the world's largest and most visited art museum, containing 380,000 objects in 72,000 square metres of display space, of which perhaps 35,000 are on permanent display — and yet the number people most remember from a visit is three: the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory, and the Venus de Milo. The Louvre rewards the visitor who ignores these three entirely: the Dutch masters of the Richelieu Wing, the Mesopotamian antiquities of the Sully Wing basement, the Flemish tapestries, the Islamic art collection — rooms of equal or greater quality that are accessible at 9am on any Tuesday with no queue. The Musée d'Orsay (the Impressionist collection, in a converted Beaux Arts railway station) and the Centre Pompidou (modern and contemporary art, with the finest rooftop terrace view in Paris) complete the essential museum circuit.

But Paris is equally its neighbourhoods: Le Marais (the medieval and Renaissance quarter, now the LGBTQ+ and Jewish cultural centre, with the finest concentration of independent galleries and the best falafel in Europe on Rue des Rosiers); Montmartre (the hilltop village, the Sacré-Cœur, the vineyard, the Place du Tertre where painters have been working since Renoir came here in the 1870s); Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, the Café de Flore, the two best cheese shops in France on Rue de Buci); and the Canal Saint-Martin neighbourhood (the iron footbridges, the boulangeries, the Sunday morning promenade of young Parisians with their Sunday papers) — each a complete world with its own rhythm, its own character, its own argument about what it means to live in Paris.

Marseille is the city France spent centuries trying to ignore and is now finally acknowledging as extraordinary. Founded by Greek traders from Phocaea in 600 BCE — making it the oldest city in France by more than six centuries — it has always been a port city with the specific character that ports develop: cosmopolitan, commercial, rough-edged, indifferent to metropolitan opinion. The Marseillais have always defined themselves against Paris, and the city has always drawn its identity from the Mediterranean rather than from France: the cooking is built on olive oil, saffron, garlic and sea urchins; the football club (Olympique de Marseille, whose ultras are among the most passionate in Europe) is the primary civic religion; the city's specific mixture of Corsican, Italian, Maghrebi, West African and Armenian communities has produced a cultural synthesis unlike anything in Paris.

The Vieux-Port (Old Port) — the horseshoe-shaped harbour where the Greek founders established their settlement in 600 BCE and where the morning fish market still takes place under the same sun — is the civic centre of Marseille, framed by the Fort Saint-Jean and the Fort Saint-Nicolas (Vauban, 17th century) and overlooked by the Notre-Dame de la Garde basilica on its hill above the city. The MuCEM (Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, Rudy Ricciotti, 2013) — a fibreglass latticework cube connected by a bridge to the Fort Saint-Jean — is the finest piece of 21st-century museum architecture in France and houses the most important collection relating to Mediterranean civilisations in the world.

Bouillabaisse — the Marseille fish stew of at least three and ideally six or seven types of Mediterranean fish (rascasse, grondin, saint-pierre, vive, congre), simmered with saffron, fennel, tomatoes and orange peel, served with the rouille (saffron and garlic mayonnaise) spread on croutons that have been rubbed with garlic — is the most territorial dish in France. The Charte de la Bouillabaisse (1980) specifies the minimum fish species required for authentic preparation, and any restaurant that serves it without at least five species is, in Marseille, a fraud. The best version is at a handful of restaurants on the Quai du Port and the Vallon des Auffes, and costs between £45 and £90 per person for the full experience. It is worth it.

Bordeaux spent two centuries as La Belle Endormie (the Sleeping Beauty) — a city of extraordinary 18th-century architectural beauty that had fallen into provincial somnolence, its economy built on a wine trade that had decoupled from urban life, its streets unmaintained, its river relationship squandered. The transformation since 2006 — when the TGV connected Bordeaux to Paris in 2 hours and the city launched a comprehensive urban regeneration under Mayor Alain Juppé — has been one of the most remarkable in France: the Garonne waterfront entirely redesigned as a public realm of fountains, trams and terraces; the UNESCO-listed 18th-century city centre cleaned and restored; the Cité du Vin (a wine museum of extraordinary ambition, Anorak Architecture, 2016) established as a major cultural institution.

The 18th-century city centre of Bordeaux — the Grand Théâtre (Victor Louis, 1780, the most beautiful neo-Classical theatre in France), the Place de la Bourse with its reflecting pool (miroir d'eau, the world's largest reflecting pool — 3,450 square metres, alternately filled with water and misted with fog in a cycle that creates the most photographed image in modern Bordeaux), the arcaded streets of the Chartrons district — is a UNESCO World Heritage site of remarkable homogeneity: a complete 18th-century planned city in dressed limestone that makes Bordeaux the closest equivalent to Bath in the French urban tradition.

The wine country surrounding Bordeaux — the Médoc to the northwest (Château Margaux, Château Latour, Château Mouton Rothschild, the most famous wine estates on earth), Saint-Émilion to the east (a UNESCO-listed medieval wine town built over a monolithic rock-cut church, surrounded by Merlot vineyards, 45 minutes by train), Sauternes to the south (the sweet wine appellation whose Château d'Yquem is the most expensive white wine in the world) — is accessible from the city by train, bicycle and regional bus in combinations that allow a different wine appellation every day for two weeks without repeating. The Cité du Vin's roof terrace bar serves the definitive wine introduction: a glass of the region's best current vintage with the entire Bordeaux panorama as its backdrop.

Strasbourg is the city that embodies the specifically European project most completely: a city that has been French and German alternately (French 1681–1870, German 1870–1919, French 1919–1940, German 1940–1944, French 1944–present), that now hosts the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights, and that has made of this border position a specific cultural identity — the Alsatian culture that combines French sophistication with German rigour in a food, architecture and language tradition that is unique in Europe. The dialect of Alsace (Alsatian, still spoken by older residents) is incomprehensible to both French and German monoglots; the choucroute garnie (sauerkraut with sausages and pork, the regional dish) is served in winstubs (wine bars) alongside Alsatian Riesling and Gewurztraminer; and the half-timbered houses of La Petite France quarter look simultaneously like a French postcard and a German fairy tale.

The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg (begun 1015, the spire completed 1439) was the tallest building in the world from 1647 to 1874 and remains one of the finest pieces of Gothic stone carving in Europe: the western facade — a lacework of 2,000 carved stone figures across three portals — is the most elaborate Romanesque-to-Gothic transition in French architecture, and the interior houses a 16th-century astronomical clock (the Horloge Astronomique) that performs a mechanical theatre every day at 12:30 (apostles, crowing cock, Death striking the hour) that has been entertaining visitors since 1574. The Grande Île (the island in the Ill where the city's historic centre stands) was the first entire city centre in the world to be inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site (1988).

The Christmas market of Strasbourg (Christkindelsmarik, operating since 1570 — the oldest Christmas market in France and one of the oldest in Europe) is the most atmospherically complete Christmas experience in France: 300 wooden chalets spread across eleven squares in the historic centre, selling Alsatian gingerbread (bredele), mulled wine (vin chaud), foie gras, Christmas ornaments and the specific Alsatian craft objects that have defined the visual language of European Christmas since the 16th century. The combination of the Gothic cathedral lit at night, the snow (not guaranteed but frequent in December), the smell of cinnamon and mulled wine, and the medieval streets decorated with 300,000 lights makes Strasbourg in December the most completely realised seasonal experience of any French city.

Toulouse is called La Ville Rose (the Pink City) for the specific terracotta-coloured brick that forms every building in the historic centre — a warm, southern stone that turns different shades of rose and amber through the day as the light changes, giving the city a visual coherence that is simultaneously very French (the rationalism of the urban plan, the Haussmann-influenced 19th-century streets) and very southern (the open terraces, the café culture, the specific Occitan identity that distinguishes Toulouse from northern French cities as clearly as Lyon distinguishes itself from Paris). It is also a city of 100,000 students (the fourth-largest student population in France), which gives it an energy and an economic vitality that many provincial French cities of similar size lack.

The Basilique Saint-Sernin (begun 1080, largely complete by 1120) is the largest surviving Romanesque church in Europe: a pilgrim church on the Camino de Santiago route, its octagonal brick tower rising 65 metres above the city, its interior containing some of the finest Romanesque sculpture in France and the ambulatory and radiating chapels that represent the architectural standard for the pilgrimage church type that spread across southern France and northern Spain in the 11th and 12th centuries. The Musée des Augustins (housed in a former Augustinian convent, its Gothic cloister one of the finest in France) contains the most important collection of Romanesque and Gothic sculpture in southern France.

Cassoulet — the slow-cooked bean and meat stew that is the definitive dish of Occitanie — is the subject of one of the most sustained arguments in French gastronomy: the three towns of Toulouse, Carcassonne and Castelnaudary each claim to produce the authentic version, and the specific composition (Toulouse uses confit de canard and Toulouse sausage; Carcassonne adds leg of lamb; Castelnaudary uses only pork and confit) is a matter of regional identity rather than mere culinary preference. The cassoulet of Toulouse, served in the city's brasseries on Rue des Filatiers in the Capitole quarter, is the most accessible and most consistently excellent version, and eating it on a cold December evening with a glass of Fronton red wine is among the most complete experiences that Occitan food culture provides.

Montpellier is the fastest-growing city in France and one of the most surprising: a Mediterranean university city of 300,000 people that combines the architectural heritage of a prosperous medieval and early-modern commercial town with the specific energy of a city where students constitute 25% of the population and where the 300 days of annual sunshine produce a quality of outdoor life — the terrace culture, the evening promenades on the Place de la Comédie, the weekend migrations to the beaches of the Hérault coast — that no northern French city can match.

The Place de la Comédie (the central square, nicknamed l'Œuf — the Egg — for its oval shape) is the civic heart of Montpellier: the opera house (Opéra Comédie, 1888), the 18th-century fountain of the Three Graces, and the surrounding terraces of cafés where the city's social life operates from 8am to midnight. The Promenade du Peyrou (a formal 17th-century terrace with a triumphal arch dedicated to Louis XIV and an aqueduct visible across the city) gives the most complete panoramic view of Montpellier, from the medieval rooftops of the Écusson quarter to the distant Mediterranean and the Hérault plain.

The Montpellier medical school — founded in 1220, making it the oldest still-functioning medical school in the world — has been educating doctors for 800 years in the same buildings (the Faculty of Medicine occupies the former monastery of the Saint-Benoît order, its anatomy theatre dating from 1794). The specific relationship between medicine and botany that the school pioneered in the 16th century under Guillaume Rondelet produced the Jardin des Plantes de Montpellier (1593 — the oldest botanical garden in France, still in daily operation, free to enter), where the plants that defined European pharmacopoeia for three centuries can be seen growing in the Mediterranean climate that nurtured them.