Billom

Billom is one of those towns that gets called a hidden gem so often it almost stops meaning anything, but I’ll say it anyway: this is a genuinely well-preserved medieval town a short drive from Clermont-Ferrand that most people, including a fair number of locals I mentioned it to afterward, have never actually visited. It was one of the first seats of higher learning in France, with a theological university founded here in the thirteenth century that predates several better-known French institutions, and the wealth that came with that status is still visible in the density of carved stone and half-timbering packed into a very small old town.

A university town that outlived its university

Billom’s university closed centuries ago, its faculties eventually absorbed into what became the University of Clermont-Ferrand, but the town’s medieval fabric survived largely intact, which is part of why walking it feels less like a curated old quarter and more like an accident of history nobody got around to demolishing. The Rue des Boucheries and the streets around the old covered market are lined with genuinely old timber-framed houses, corbelled upper floors jutting out over the street on carved wooden brackets, some of them dated to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We ducked into the Saint-Cerneuf collegiate church, whose crypt turned out to be far older than the Gothic nave above it, with column capitals carved in a rougher, more archaic style that a volunteer guide dated to the Carolingian period.

Garlic country

The other thing Billom is known for, at least within Auvergne, is garlic — the surrounding Limagne plain has grown it for centuries, and the town holds an annual garlic fair every August that draws growers from across the region. We arrived a few weeks after the fair, but strings of pink-tinged garlic were still hanging outside half the shopfronts, and a small épicerie sold nothing else, dozens of braided ropes of it stacked floor to ceiling. Lia bought three strings we didn’t remotely need and we spent the drive back to Clermont trying to figure out how we’d fit them in a suitcase to Mexico. We didn’t, in the end, but the smell lingered in the car for a week regardless.

When to go: Come in August for the garlic fair if the timing works, but Billom’s old town is a rewarding half-day trip from Clermont-Ferrand in any season.