Dordogne & Bordelais

The Dordogne is the region I recommend to anyone who claims to have “done” France and only means Paris and the Riviera. This is deep, slow, honey-stone country — a river valley lined with medieval bastide towns, cave paintings twenty thousand years old, and a kitchen built entirely around duck fat, walnuts, and truffles. Nothing here is in a hurry. The Dordogne River loops through limestone cliffs in a way that seems designed for exactly one purpose: making you stop the car.

Sarlat-la-Canéda is the golden-stone market town at the heart of it, its medieval core so well preserved that period films use it without dressing a single street. From the clifftop village of Domme, the whole river valley unrolls below you, with La Roque-Gageac and Beynac-et-Cazenac clinging to the rock face on either bank. Nearby, Les Eyzies anchors the prehistoric heartland — the caves at Lascaux are close enough to feel the weight of the paintings even from a facsimile. The bastide of Monpazier and the abbey town of Brantôme, sometimes called the Venice of the Périgord for the river that circles it, round out a region where every village seems to have been built specifically to be photographed at golden hour. West along the river, Bergerac trades on its own appellation, and Périgueux anchors the department with a Byzantine-domed cathedral that looks like it wandered in from another country. Further west still, Bordeaux brings the region to the Atlantic coast with its grand 18th-century quays and the vineyards of Saint-Émilion and the Médoc fanning out around it — the wine capital that makes sense of every bottle on the table back in Sarlat.

When to go: May, June, and September, when the markets are full and the heat hasn’t yet turned oppressive. Book restaurant tables ahead in summer — this is a region that takes lunch seriously, and the good tables fill early.