Vichy

No town in Auvergne carries the weight of its own name the way Vichy does. For most of its history it was simply the grandest thermal resort in France, the place Napoleon III came to take the waters and effectively invented as a purpose-built spa town in the 1860s, complete with parks, casinos, and opera house. Then for four years in the 1940s the name came to mean something else entirely, and no amount of Belle Époque ironwork erases that second meaning. Visiting Vichy means walking through both histories at once, and I found that tension more honest, and more worth sitting with, than I expected.

An emperor’s spa town, built almost overnight

Vichy’s thermal quarter is one of the most complete Belle Époque spa complexes left in France, largely because Napoleon III personally sponsored its development after visiting for his own health in the 1860s, and the town responded by throwing up covered galleries, ornate glass-and-iron pavilions, and a casino-opera house within a few decades. Walking the Parc des Sources under its long glazed canopy, past the pump rooms where people still fill bottles from taps running mineral water, felt like stepping into a stage set — which in a sense it always was, built to project imperial glamour as much as to treat illness. The Art Nouveau details are everywhere once you start looking: wrought-iron balconies twisted into vine patterns, ceramic tilework on hotel facades, a general sense of a town that spent a fortune on decoration in a very narrow window of time.

The history that came after

It’s impossible to visit Vichy and not think about 1940 to 1944, when the town’s hotels — chosen precisely because they had enough rooms and switchboards to house a relocated government — became the seat of Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist regime. There’s no dramatic memorial plastered across the town center; the darker history is present mostly in its absence, in the fact that a handful of hotel buildings that housed ministries during the occupation now function as ordinary spa hotels again, their history acknowledged only in modest signage if at all. We spent part of an afternoon at the small municipal displays that do address the period honestly, and it left me thinking about how a place can rehabilitate its physical self far faster than its name.

When to go: Spring through early autumn for the parks and the thermal quarter at their best; the town is also a reasonable base year-round given its rail connections into the rest of Auvergne.