Toulouse layers 2,000 years into terracotta brick: a Roman garrison town, the Visigothic capital of the 5th century, a Cathar battleground where Simon de Montfort died, and a Renaissance boomtown enriched by woad dye. Its museums hold the proof.
The city's archaeology museum, in a 16th-century college building beside Saint-Sernin, holds the Chiragan villa marbles — 90 Roman imperial portraits from Augustus to Constantine, the largest such series outside Rome. Open 10:00–18:00, closed Mondays.
Built on the spot where Saturnin, Toulouse's first bishop, was killed in 250 AD — dragged to death behind a bull, which named the street (Taur). Its 15th-century clocher-mur, a flat brick wall-belfry, is the prototype for the Occitan style.
A 14th-century Augustinian friary turned museum in 1793, holding Europe's finest collection of Romanesque cloister capitals — carvings rescued from the demolished cloisters of La Daurade and Saint-Étienne after the Revolution.
The Counts of Toulouse ruled from the Château Narbonnais here, on the Roman rampart line; it later housed the Inquisition tribunal and the Parlement. Fragments of the medieval walls survive in the courtyard of the present Palais de Justice.
Occitanie's memorial museum documents Toulouse under Vichy and the Occupation, the local maquis networks and the deportation convoys. Rebuilt and reopened in 2020 with survivor testimony recordings and clandestine press archives.
Toulouse's oldest surviving bridge (1544–1632) has flood-relief arches above the piers so the Garonne can pass through rather than tear it down. Plaques on the Tounis quay wall record the June 1875 flood that drowned 200 people in Saint-Cyprien.
Toulouse built the Aéropostale mail routes to South America flown by Mermoz and Saint-Exupéry, then Caravelle and Concorde. Aeroscopia displays two Concordes, a Super Guppy and a Caravelle in a hangar beside the Airbus works. Open 09:30–18:00.
A 1971 concrete crypt sunk below street level: visitors walk a descending ramp past coloured glass slits, one for each year of the Occupation, to a chamber naming the region's deportees. Deliberately buried rather than raised on a plinth.
The grandest of the pastel merchants' mansions, built from 1555 for woad-dye millionaire Pierre d'Assézat by architect Nicolas Bachelier, its three classical orders stacked in stone and brick. Inside, the Bemberg collection runs Cranach to Bonnard.
The Garonne's left bank was the poor, flood-prone quarter outside the walls, where the 12th-century pilgrim hospital on the Compostela road grew into the Hôtel-Dieu. Its riverside brick galleries and the Musée d'Histoire de la Médecine sit inside.
The Dominicans' mother church, begun 1230 as the order's answer to Catharism, holds the relics of Thomas Aquinas beneath the altar. The single row of pillars ends in the 22-rib palmier vault of 1385, the finest in southern Gothic brickwork.
Toulouse's cathedral is visibly two buildings that never met: a wide 13th-century Raymondine nave joined at an angle to an ambitious Gothic choir begun in 1272 and never completed, the misalignment left plainly on show inside.