Bourges opened France's first Maison de la Culture and still runs its museums free of charge inside Renaissance mansions. Beyond the cathedral lie decorative arts collections, a contemporary art centre in a factory, an Art Deco garden and blue-lantern nights.
The archaeology and folk-art museum inside the Renaissance Hôtel Cujas of 1515. Gallo-Roman funerary steles, the alabaster mourners carved for Jean de Berry's tomb, and reconstructed Berry farm interiors upstairs.
A merchant's mansion of the early 1500s on rue Bourbonnoux, built over Gallo-Roman walls. The chapel's coffered ceiling carries alchemical emblems; inside are Flemish tapestries, Limoges enamels and 17th-century cabinetwork.
The exhibition gallery of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art, running four or five contemporary shows a year around invited and graduating artists. Small, sharply curated, and the best read on what younger French artists are making.
An Art Deco public garden laid out between 1923 and 1930 by Paul Marguerite on drained marshland: clipped yew arcades, concrete pergolas, a sunken rose parterre and a stone bandstand. Labelled Jardin Remarquable.
The first Maison de la Culture in France, opened by André Malraux in 1964 and still the region's main stage for dance, theatre and contemporary music. Two auditoria, a foyer gallery and a season running September to June.
The parish church of the merchants' quarter, rebuilt in flamboyant Gothic after the great fire of 1487 and finished with a Renaissance west front. Sixteenth-century glass in the side chapels and a classified organ case over the nave.
One of central France's oldest natural history collections, rehoused in 1989 beside the Auron: dioramas of the Berry wetlands, a large entomology hall, and a live vivarium of amphibians and reptiles on the lower floor.
From May to September the old town is traced after dark by blue lanterns and projections thrown onto the facades of the Hôtel Lallemant, the Grange aux Dîmes and the cathedral chevet — a narrated light walk of about ninety minutes.
135 hectares of working allotment gardens on the Yèvre and Voiselle floodplain, tended by around 1,300 marais gardeners and crossed only on foot or by flat-bottomed barque. A protected site immediately below the cathedral.
The 19th-century iron-framed covered market at the top of the old town, where Berry producers sell Chavignol goat cheese at every stage of ripening, Sancerre by the bottle, lentilles vertes du Berry and pâté de Pâques.
A disused industrial site north of the centre converted into an arts complex: the Transpalette contemporary art centre, concert halls, artist studios, a radio station and a bar. Exhibitions run in long seasonal cycles.
The city's small live-music room, programmed year-round by the team behind the Printemps de Bourges festival: a few hundred capacity, French rap, rock and electronic bills, and the venue where festival discoveries play first.