Tours in Toulouse

The brick catches you first. Toulouse doesn't have grey stone facades like Paris or pale limestone like Bordeaux, it has this warm, dusty pink brick that goes almost orange when the sun drops low, and everyone here just calls it the Ville Rose without a second thought. Walk down Rue de Metz in the late afternoon and you'll see what they mean before anyone explains it to you.

The centre of things is Place du Capitole, a wide square that empties and fills depending on the hour, market stalls in the morning, café terraces taking over by evening, with the Capitole building itself standing along one side and a donjon tucked behind it that most visitors walk straight past. From there the streets narrow and lead you past the Musée des Augustins, worth ducking into even briefly, and on toward Place Saint Pierre, which sits close to the Garonne and catches a breeze off the water that the rest of the city doesn't get.

Basilique Saint Sernin is the other anchor of the old town, a long brick structure you can see the shape of from several streets away, and standing in front of it as the light goes gold is one of those moments that makes the walk worthwhile even if you know nothing about the building itself. This is the route our sunset walking tour follows, timed so you're moving through these squares and past these monuments as the heat of the day lifts and the brick starts to glow.

Beyond that stretch, Toulouse rewards slow wandering along the river, detours into the food markets, and evenings spent doing exactly what locals do, which is sitting outside for longer than seems necessary. If there's a building or a corner of the city you want to see up close that isn't on our route, ask, a guide here can usually take you.