Toulouse

Toulouse, a city of history, technology, and academics

The old capital of Languedoc and France's fourth-largest city, Toulouse (known as la ville en rose, or the city in pink), is cosmopolitan in flavor. The major city of the southwest, it's the gateway to travel in the Pyrenees.

An ancient city filled with gardens and squares, Toulouse has a stormy history: It once was the capital of the Visigoths and later the center of the comtes de Toulouse (counts of Toulouse). The city has 20 historic pipe organs, more than any other city in France, and hosts an annual international organ festival. Also making the city tick is its extraordinarily high population of students: some 110,000 in all, out of a population of 800,000.

Though Toulouse might be a city with a distinguished historical past, it’s also a city of the future and the high-tech center of France’s aviation and aerospace industries; the first regularly scheduled airline flights from France took off from the local airport in the 1920s.

© 2009, Wiley Publishing, Inc.