Albi

The Cathédrale Sainte-Cécile rises from the Tarn riverbank like a red-brick citadel, its fortress walls built not for God but against heresy. Albi, in south-west France, wears its brick in every shade of terracotta and rose, the whole old town glowing warm when the afternoon light catches the river — and inside the cathedral the contrast hits: a southern Gothic nave painted floor to ceiling in ultramarine and gold.

Sainte-Cécile was built between 1282 and 1480 in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade, a deliberate statement of the bishops' authority over the Cathar south, and its windowless brick flanks still read as a fortress. The interior holds a vast fifteenth-century Last Judgement and a carved stone rood screen of astonishing delicacy. Next door the Palais de la Berbie, the bishops' fortified palace, houses the Toulouse-Lautrec museum — the largest collection of the Albi-born painter's work anywhere — and the Pont Vieux carries the same brick across the Tarn to the gardens on the far bank. UNESCO listed the whole episcopal city in 2010 as the only surviving urban ensemble of its kind anywhere in Europe, and the market hall in the old town's heart fills its hall every morning.