France's largest Gothic cathedral and Jules Verne's adopted city
Amiens is dominated by its extraordinary Gothic cathedral — Notre-Dame d'Amiens, the largest Gothic building in France by volume and a UNESCO World Heritage Site of breathtaking interior scale. The city is also the birthplace and home of Jules Verne, whose house is now a museum. The Hortillonnages — a 300-hectare network of floating market gardens on the Somme, farmed since Roman times — are unique in northern France and explored by flat-bottomed boat.
Amiens was a major cloth-trading city in the Middle Ages, which funded the cathedral's construction beginning in 1220. The cathedral was completed in just 68 years — extraordinary speed for Gothic construction — giving it an unusual stylistic unity. The Peace of Amiens (1802) briefly ended the Napoleonic Wars and was the only period of general peace in Europe between 1793 and 1815. The city was heavily damaged in both World Wars; the cathedral survived, protected by sandbag barriers.