A thousand years of trade and intellectual activity have made MONTPELLIER a teeming, energetic city. Benjamin of Tudela, the tireless twelfth-century Jewish traveller, reported its streets crowded with traders, Christian and Saracen, Arabs from the Maghrib, merchants from Lombardy, from the kingdom of Rome, from every corner of Egypt, Greece, Gaul, Spain, Genoa and Pisa. A few hiccups - like being sold to France in 1349, almost total destruction for its Protestantism in 1622, and depression in the wine trade in the early years of this century - have done little to dent this progress. Today it vies with Toulouse for the title of most dynamic city in the south. The reputation of its university especially, founded in the thirteenth century and most famous for its medical school, is a long-standing one: more than 60,000 students still set the intellectual and cultural tone of the city - the average age of whose residents is said to be just 25.

The City
Montpellier's city centre - the old town - is small, compact, architecturally homogeneous, full of charm and teeming with life, except in July and August when the students are on holiday and everyone else is at the beach. And the place is almost entirely pedestrianized, so you can walk the narrow streets without looking anxiously over your shoulder.

At the hub of the city's life, joining the old part to its newer accretions, is place de la Com�die , or "L'Oeuf" to the initiated. This colossal, oblong square, paved with cream-coloured marble, has a fountain at its centre and caf�s either side. One end is closed by the Op�ra, an ornate nineteenth-century theatre ; the other opens onto the Esplanade , a beautiful tree-lined promenade which ends in the Corum concert hall , dug into the hillside and topped off in pink granite, with splendid views from the roof. The city's most trumpeted museum, the Mus�e Fabre (Tues-Fri 9am-5.30pm, Sat & Sun 9.30am-5pm; 25F/?3.81), is close by on boulevard Sarrail and contains a large and historically important collection of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Flemish and English painting, including works by Delacroix, Raphael, Jan van Steen and Veronese.

From the north side of L'Oeuf, rue de la Loge and rue Foch , opened in the 1880s in Montpellier's own Haussmann-izing spree, slice through the heart of the old city. Either side of them, a maze of narrow lanes slopes away to the encircling modern boulevards. Few buildings survive from before the 1622 siege, but the city's busy bourgeoisie quickly made up for the loss, proclaiming their financial power in lots of austere seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions. Known as "Lou Clapas" (rubble), the area is rapidly being restored and gentrified. It's a pleasure to wander through and come upon the secretive little squares like place St-Roch, place St-Ravy and place de la Canourgue.

First left off rue de la Loge is Grande-Rue Jean-Moulin , where Moulin, hero of the Resistance, lived at no. 21. To the left, at no. 32, the present-day Chamber of Commerce is located in one of the finest eighteenth-century h�tels , the H�tel St-C�me, originally built as a demonstration operating theatre for medical students. On the opposite corner, rue de l'Argenterie forks up to place Jean-Jaur�s . This square is a nodal point in the city's student life: on fine evenings between 6pm and 7pm you get the impression that the half of the population not in place de la Com�die is sitting here and in the adjacent place du March�-aux-Fleurs. Through the Gothic doorway of no. 10 of place Jean-Jaur�s, is the so-called palace of the kings of Aragon, who ruled Montpellier for a stretch in the thirteenth century. Close by is the Halles Castellane , a graceful, iron-framed market hall.

A short walk from place Jean-Jaur�s, the H�tel de Varenne, on place P�trarque, houses two local history museums of somewhat specialized interest, the Mus�e de Vieux Montpellier (Tues-Sat 9am-noon & 1.30-5pm; free), concentrating on the city's history, and the more interesting, private Mus�e Fougau on the top floor (Wed & Thurs 3-6.30pm; free), dealing with the folk history of Languedoc and things Occitan. Off to the right, the lively little rue des Tr�soriers-de-France has one of the best seventeenth-century houses, the H�tel Lunaret , at no. 5, while round the block on rue Jacques Coeur you'll find the Mus�e Languedocien (Mon-Sat 2-5pm; 30F/?4.58), which houses a very mixed collection of Greek, Egyptian and other antiquities.

On the hill at the end of rue Foch, from which the royal artillery bombarded the Protestants in 1622, the formal gardens of the Promenade du Peyrou look out across the city and away to the Pic St-Loup, which dominates the hinterland behind Montpellier, with the distant smudge of the C�vennes beyond. At the farther end a swagged and pillared water tower marks the end of an eighteenth-century aqueduct modelled on the Pont du Gard. Beneath the grand sweep of its double tier of arches there is a pretty fruit and veg market (daily) and a huge Saturday flea market . At the city end of the promenade, a vainglorious triumphal arch shows Louis XIV-Hercules stomping on the Austrian eagle and the English lion, tactlessly reminding the locals of his victory over their Protestant "heresy".

Lower down the hill, on boulevard Henri-IV, the lovely but slightly run-down Jardin des Plantes (July & Aug Mon-Sat 8.30am-noon & 2-6pm; rest of year Mon-Sat 10am-5pm; free), with alleys of exotic trees, is France's oldest botanical garden. In the words of the poet Paul Val�ry, this is where "the pensive, the careworn and talkers-to-themselves come towards evening". Across the road is the long-suffering cathedral , with its massive porch, sporting a patchwork of styles from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Inside is a memorial to the bishop of Montpellier who sided with the half-million destitute vine-growers who came to demonstrate against their plight in 1907 and were fired on by government troops for their pains. Above the cathedral, in the university's prestigious medical school on rue de l'�cole-de-M�decine, the Mus�e Atger (Mon, Wed & Thurs 1.30-5.45pm; free) has a distinguished academic collection of French and Italian drawings, while the macabre Mus�e d'Anatomie (daily 2.30-5pm; free) displays all sorts of revolting things in bottles. Close by is the pretty little place de la Canourgue, and, beyond, down rue d'Aigrefeuille, the old university quarter, with some good bookshops on rue de l'Universit�.

South of place de la Com�die stretches the controversial quarter of Antigone , a chain of postmodern squares and open spaces designed to provide a mix of fair-rent housing and offices, aligned along a monumental axis from the place du Nombre-d'Or, through place du Mill�naire, to the glassed-in arch of the H�tel de la R�gion. It's more interesting in scale and design than most attempts at urban renewal, but it has failed to attract the crowds away from the place de la Com�die and is often deserted. The enclosed spaces in particular work well, with their theatrical references to classical architecture, like oversized cornices and columns supporting only sky. The more open spaces are, however, disturbing, with something totalitarian and inhuman about their scale and blandness.