France

Can better than 80 million foreign visitors a year be wrong? More tourists come to France than to any other country in the world, seeking a full-on immersion in that inimitable art de vivre. You can likely summon in mind a few quintessential images of France, but the country’s more diverse than postcard imagery. Whether you come here to eat, to drink, or sightsee along storied avenues and fabled countryside, it's not hard to dig beneath the romantic surface and discover the vital and moving truths of everyday France.

The French landscape comes in many styles. There’s the jagged and snow-clad, as in the French Alps or the Pyrenees. As defining a landmark as the Arc de Triomphe or Notre-Dame Cathedral is the blocky massif of 15,781-foot Mont Blanc, France’s highest peak and the loftiest in all of the Alps; it also well symbolizes the rich tradition of Alpine mountaineering. There’s the gentle and pastoral: Dordogne’s hedgerows and fields, Burgundy’s vineyards and rolling pastures grazed by snow-white Charolais cattle. Rugged gorges break the limestone plateaus of the Massif Central; tidal currents flush the yawning estuary of the Gironde; the Atlantic coast of the Cote d’Argent rises to a sandy pinnacle at the Great Dune of Pyla. In Brittany, wander a footpath through the oaks and beeches of the Foret de Paimpont, the mythical home of the wizard Merlin, or discover France at its most farflung in the rocky and storm-lashed Iles d’Ouessant archipelago.

France’s historical and cultural heritage, meanwhile, is almost maddeningly vast. Consider this spectrum: the hauntingly beautiful Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet to the masterpieces of Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Van Gogh in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. That’s tens of thousands of years of artistic expression. Survey Bronze Age “pile-dwellings,” ghostly Roman roads and aqueducts, the medieval splendor of the Chartres Cathedral, the sobering beaches of Normandy—the French landscape is saturated with human stories and human dramas. And those sagas have produced monument after monument of shimmering beauty: the islet-topping abbey of Mont Saint Michel, the Palace of Versailles, the bridge of Avignon, and of course, the Eiffel Tower.

We could rattle on endlessly—and happily—about French wine and cuisine, which set a benchmark admired around the world and establish the tone for the country’s art de vivre. Your gastronomic adventures here can lead you through the Michelin-star-spangled world of haute cuisine—or to a simple farmhouse meal of rustic bread and goat’s-milk cheese. An oenophile in France is on a religious pilgrimage: wandering the world’s most lauded appellations—Bordeaux, Loire, Burgundy, Rhone, Champagne—and tasting the holy terroir with every sip.

As easy as it is to be overwhelmed by France—by all there is to see and do and ingest, namely—it’s one of those destinations where you can simply let the spirit of the place wash over you, and you’ll come away bedazzled.