Bordeaux is 2,000 years of layered stone: Roman Burdigala's amphitheatre, Merovingian sarcophagi under Saint-Seurin, medieval belfries, a port enriched by colonial trade, and a submarine bunker too thick to demolish. Three days follow that sequence.
Bordeaux was Roman Burdigala, capital of Aquitania Secunda. The ground floor holds the 1st-century Tutelle pillars, Gallo-Roman funerary altars dredged from the Garonne and the gold Tayac torque; upper rooms cover the slave-trade port.
Lunch inside a deconsecrated 19th-century church on Place Camille Jullian, converted into an arthouse cinema and café. Vaulted nave, original stone piers, blackboard menu of salads, tartines and plats du jour around €14-20.
The only standing Roman structure in Bordeaux: a 2nd-century amphitheatre for roughly 15,000 spectators, its brick-and-stone arcades left stranded in a residential street after being quarried for centuries and nearly demolished in 1793.
Bordeaux's oldest place of worship, built over a 4th-century necropolis. The crypt holds Merovingian sarcophagi and early Christian mosaics; upstairs, an 11th-century porch and the 14th-century alabaster reliefs of Saint Seurin's life.
A 42,000 m² U-boat bunker built 1941-43 by the Organisation Todt with forced labour, its roof up to 9 metres of concrete — which is why it still stands. Four flooded pens now host immersive projections on the water.
A 1932 brasserie on the Allées de Tourny with its original Art Deco panelling, brass rails and banquettes intact — the sort of room where Bordeaux's négociants signed deals. Classic carte: sole meunière, tête de veau, lamproie in season.
Three floors on the Resistance, Deportation and Free France, gathered around Jean Moulin — who was prefect of nearby Chartres before leading the unified Resistance. Clandestine printing presses, forged papers, and the June 1940 exodus when the French government fled to Bordeaux.
Erected 1894-1902 on Place des Quinconces to the Girondin deputies guillotined in 1793. The bronze horse-and-chariot fountains were seized by the occupying forces in 1943 for scrap, survived in a Paris depot, and were only reinstalled in 1983.
A 114-metre free-standing Gothic belfry, the tallest in southern France, finished in 1492 and rebuilt after an 1868 lightning strike. Its crypt once displayed 70 naturally mummified bodies exhumed from the churchyard, a draw for 19th-century travellers.
Bordeaux's belly since 1749, rebuilt in iron and glass and still the working market at 06:00. Eat at the counters: oysters from Arcachon with white wine at Chez Jean-Mi, or tripe and grilled sardines at the stalls along the north aisle.
In the 18th-century vaulted cellars of Irish merchant Francis Burke on rue Borie. Chartrons was the foreign traders' quarter — Irish, Dutch, German — whose fortunes were tied to the Atlantic triangle. Coopers' tools, ledgers, branding irons.
Ordered by Napoleon in 1810 for troops heading to Spain and completed in 1822, the first bridge ever built across the Garonne here. Its 17 arches match the letters in Napoléon Bonaparte; foundations were sunk using a diving bell.