Bordeaux’s Museum Quarter

The Travel Pages visits Bordeaux’s Museum Quarter, home to three excellent museums, the Cathédrale St-André and the Tour Pey-Berland, for great city views.

Bordeaux’s Museum Quarter is just a few minutes’ walk south from the city centre and you can easily spend all day there, as we did. Avoid Mondays or Tuesdays, if you can, when one or other of the museums is closed.

Musée d’Aquitaine

Walk south from the Golden Triangle and you arrive at the city’s cathedral, and around it a clutch of museums. It’s an area that can easily be explored in a day, as none of the museums is huge. The best of them is the Musée d’Aquitaine, which tells the story of Bordeaux and the surrounding areas from prehistoric times onwards.

One display reconstructs an archaeological dig, and is very atmospheric. There are Roman mosaics and coins, medieval mosaics, and the vast stone frame of a 16th-century rose window. It’s an excellent collection, very stylishly displayed in places.

Musée d’Aquitaine
20 cours Pasteur
05 56 01 51 00
Closed Monday
Free

Musée des Beaux-Arts

By comparison the Musée des Beaux-Arts is disappointing for a city the size of Bordeaux. Much of the building is given over to temporary exhibitions, which means that the core collection is limited to a few rooms in one wing, and only a fraction of the 3000 works are on display at any one time.

The collection focuses on European art from the 15th century onwards, and while there are items by such well-known names as Eugene Delacroix, Henri Matisse, Titian and Joshua Reynolds, whether these are on show at a particular time is not certain.

Musée des Beaux-Arts
20 cours d’Albret
05 56 10 20 56
Closed Tuesday
Free

Musée des Arts Décoratifs

The Musée des Arts Décoratifs is interesting to see as it is housed in the 1779 mansion of a wealthy Bordeaux aristocrat and merchant, and as well as seeing the extensive collection of fine art objects, you do also get the feeling of what it would have been like to live in a well-to-do family home like this. The rooms are filled with fine examples of furniture, statues, clocks, prints, paintings, portraits, ceramics and many other exquisite items.

Musée des Arts Décoratifs
39 rue Bouffard
05 56 00 72 50
Closed Tuesday
Free

Cathédrale St-André

The Cathédrale St-André is an impressive building, with one wall remaining of the original 12th-century church that stood here, and where King Louis VII married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1137. Most of the building dates back to the 13th and 14th centuries, and there is also a separate bell tower, the Tour Pey-Berland, topped with a statue of Our Lady of Aquitaine covered in gold leaf. This is open to the public and provides excellent cityscape views.

Cathédrale St-André
place Pey-Berland
05 56 52 68 10
Closed Monday mornings
Free

Tour Pey-Berland
place Pey-Berland
05 56 81 26 25
Closed Mondays in winter
Small fee