Clermont-Ferrand

The reason to come. A Gothic cathedral begun in 1248 and built from black Volvic lava stone, which makes it the only cathedral in France the colour of coal. It took the Hundred Years War, the Revolution and finally Viollet-le-Duc to finish the twin spires, now over a hundred metres of near-black stone above the city. Go in for the old glass, then climb the Tour de la Bayette for the volcanoes.

Best shot The black twin spires from Parc de Montjuzet, or the west front at low sun, charcoal against the sky.

• Touristy

A honey-coloured Romanesque basilica, UNESCO-listed and nearly a thousand years old, keeping its darkness downstairs. In the low crypt a Black Madonna has been venerated since at least 1614, set beside an old sacred well that may go back to a Roman shrine. Light a candle and let your eyes adjust.

Best shot The carved chevet from behind, or the candlelit Black Madonna down in the crypt.

• Quiet

The other half of the city, and the better one. Montferrand was a walled medieval town in its own right until a royal edict forced it to marry Clermont in 1630, and being left behind is what saved it: grid-straight streets of black lava-stone and half-timbered houses, Renaissance mansions with spiral stairs hidden in their courtyards. Bypassed, hushed, and yours to wander.

Best shot The timber-framed medieval houses along rue de la Coifferie.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The dead volcano that watches the city, close to 1,500 metres and usually wearing a scarf of cloud. On its bald summit sit the excavated ruins of a Roman temple to Mercury, the biggest mountain temple in Roman Gaul, cut from dark trachyte quarried out of the volcano itself and freshly restored in 2024. Walk up, or take the rack railway, and stand where the pilgrims did.

Best shot The temple ruins in front, the chain of volcanoes falling away behind, mist over the top.

• Solo-friendly

A family workshop that has been turning things to stone since 1821. They hang objects and moulds under a fourteen-metre waterfall of mineral-heavy volcanic water, which slowly coats them in calcite until they are, in effect, limestone. The dripping galleries are strung with half-petrified casts caught mid-transformation. A day trip, and a strange one.

Best shot The main chamber, objects hanging in the streaming water, half turned to rock.

• Quiet

Pascal, who wrote that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” was born here in 1623. His bronze sits brooding in a small square, turned on purpose toward the volcanoes, where he once sent his brother-in-law up the Puy de Dôme to prove that air has weight. A quiet nod to the city’s patron genius.

A ruined medieval fortress on a black basalt outcrop, thrown up between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, then abandoned and quarried for its own stone after the Revolution. What is left is a brooding hilltop silhouette you can see for miles across the Sancy, roofless halls open to the weather. Worth the drive.

Best shot The whole fortress on its black rock against a stormy sky.

• Solo-friendly

Sixty-odd caves cut by hand into a soft volcanic cliff and lived in from Celtic times to the Revolution: a troglodyte castle, a bread oven, and a rock-hewn chapel still holding faded frescoes a thousand years old. Climb the cut stairways up through the pierced cliff face. Genuinely underground, genuinely old.

Best shot The pockmarked cliff riddled with cave mouths, or the frescoed rock chapel.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

One of the last true Art Deco hotels in France, built in 1930 and themed on the then-new radio waves, right down to the triode and radiowave motifs worked into its mosaics, mirrors and ironwork. It stands on the heights at Chamalières over the city, with a serious restaurant downstairs. Come for the period dining room and the vintage mood.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A small hotel on the tree-shaded Place Delille, built around the Auvergne writer Alexandre Vialatte, with a library of five hundred books and a sixth-floor terrace looking straight over the black cathedral roofs to the Puy de Dôme. The rooms are bright and modern, so the atmosphere is the concept, the view and the old-town setting.

• Adults only

A four-room bed and breakfast in a tall old stone house a few minutes from the black cathedral, restored so the exposed medieval stonework meets clean modern rooms, one to a floor and each named after an Auvergne volcano. Central, characterful and small enough to feel like a house you have borrowed.

• Quiet

A five-room guesthouse in a former laundry in the medieval Port quarter, each room done differently by a designer, tucked quietly near the Notre-Dame-du-Port basilica with parking of its own. The interiors run bright rather than dark, but the setting is pure old Clermont.

• Quiet

A crêperie and Auvergnat table inside the Hôtel Savaron, a flamboyant Gothic mansion built in 1513 for a consul of Clermont and listed since 1927. You eat through a warren of dark carved lava-stone vaulted rooms, a fire going in winter and a hidden courtyard in summer. One of the oldest houses in the city, and you can sit in it.

Best shot The carved lava-stone courtyard of the Hôtel Savaron, or a vaulted room by firelight.

• Adults only

A long-running bar and restaurant in the old centre doing big plates of truffade and a deep list of beer, rum and whisky, with a vaulted stone cellar underneath, the Caveau de la Michodière, that packs fifty people in for near-nightly jazz, gypsy jazz and blues. Dim, loud in the good way, and thoroughly local.

• Adults only

A speakeasy-style cocktail club on rue Saint-Hérem, low-lit and dressed to the Prohibition-era Charleston theme, pouring craft cocktails with small plates alongside. Evenings only, Tuesday to Saturday. Book a corner and settle in.

• Adults only

An independent wine merchant and bar on rue Ballainvilliers with more than five hundred mostly organic bottles, opening as a wine bar on Wednesday to Saturday evenings with Cantal cheese and charcuterie. A snug cave in the old town for a quiet, serious glass.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A cabinet of curiosities dressed up as an antiques gallery, in the medieval Montferrand quarter: paintings, old glass, taxidermy and the occasional object no one can quite explain, arranged by an eye for the strange rather than one tidy style. The stock turns over constantly. Go to look as much as to buy.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A friperie that treats secondhand like a gallery: curated rare pieces instead of bin-diving, in a retro-futurist space with a back room it hands over to rotating tattoo artists and painters. Come for the black denim and leather, stay for whatever is on the walls.

• Solo-friendly

A record shop run by the same man since 1994, thousands of vinyl and CDs stacked deep into blues, funk, psych, hard rock and metal. Collector territory, not chart pop. A proper afternoon of digging.

• Solo-friendly

An antiquarian bookseller a few steps from the black cathedral, old and rare editions across literature, history, art and philosophy. Open only a few days a week, so time it right and lose an hour in the dead stock.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet