France's most Roman city — where an amphitheater still seating 24,000 spectators stages bullfights and concerts, the Maison Carrée is the best-preserved Roman temple in the world, and the Romans also invented denim here (the cloth was called 'serge de Nîmes')
Nîmes (150,000) in Occitanie is home to the finest surviving Roman monuments in France: Les Arènes (70 CE, capacity 24,000) is one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheaters in the world and still hosts bullfights, concerts, and spectacle every summer. The Maison Carrée (c. 4–7 CE) is the most complete Roman temple surviving anywhere on earth — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2023 — opposite which Norman Foster's steel-and-glass Carré d'Art (1993) creates the deliberate dialogue between ancient and contemporary. The Pont du Gard (22km from the city, also UNESCO) is the highest surviving Rom…
Nemausus (the Roman Nîmes) was the most important Roman colony in southern Gaul, founded by veterans of Julius Caesar's Egyptian campaign (hence the city's crocodile-and-palm emblem, still the official symbol today). Emperor Augustus built the city's circuit of walls, the Maison Carrée, and expanded the amphitheater in the 1st century CE; it was one of the most prosperous cities of Roman Gaul. The city fell to the Visigoths in 472 CE and later the Franks; its Roman infrastructure survived remarkably intact through the medieval period because the amphitheater was converted into a fortified nei…