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FIGEAC lies on the River Célé, 71km east of Cahors and some 8km north of the Lot. It's a beautiful town with an unspoilt medieval centre, not too encumbered by tourism. Like many other provincial towns hereabouts, it owes its beginnings to the foundation of an abbey in the early days of Christianity in France, one which quickly became wealthy because of its position on the pilgrim routes to both Rocamadour and Compostela. In the Middle Ages it became a centre of tanning, which partly accounts for the many houses whose top floors have solelhos , or open-sided wooden galleries used for drying skins and other produce. Again, as so often, it was the Wars of Religion that pushed it into eclipse, for Figeac threw in its lot with the nearby Protestant stronghold of Montauban and suffered the same punishing reprisals by the victorious royalists in 1662 .

Roads and train line both funnel you automatically into the town centre, where the Hôtel de la Monnaie surveys place Vival. It is a splendid building whose origins go back to the thirteenth century, when the city's mint was located in this district. The building now houses the tourist office, as well as a none too exciting museum of old coins and archeological bits and pieces found in the surrounding area (May & June Mon-Sat 10am-noon & 2.30-6pm, Sun 10am-1pm; July to mid-Sept daily 10am-1pm & 2-7pm; rest of year Mon-Sat 10am-noon & 2.30-6pm; 10F/¬1.52). In the streets radiating off to the north of the square - Caviale, République, Gambetta and their cross-streets - there is a delightful range of houses of the medieval and classical periods, both stone and half-timbered with brick noggings, adorned with carvings and colonnettes, ogees, and interesting bits of ironwork. At the end of these streets are the two small squares of place Carnot and place Champollion , both of great charm. The former is the site of the old halles , under whose awning cafés now spreads their tables.

Jean-François Champollion, who cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics by deciphering the triple text of the Rosetta Stone, was born in a house at 4 impasse Champollion, off the square, and the building now houses a very interesting museum dedicated to his life and work (March-June, Sept & Oct Tues-Sun 10am-noon & 2.30-6.30pm; July & Aug daily same hours; Nov-Feb Tues-Sun 2-6pm; 20F/¬3.05). At the end of this alley, a larger-than-life reproduction of the Rosetta Stone forms the floor of the tiny place des Écritures , above which is a little garden planted with tufts of papyrus.

On the other side of place Champollion, rue Boutaric leads up to the cedar-shaded church of Notre-Dame-du-Puy , from where you get views over the roofs of the town. More interesting is the church of St-Sauveur off place des Herbes near the tourist office, with its lovely Gothic chapterhouse decorated with heavily gilded but dramatically realistic seventeenth-century carved wood panels illustrating the life of Christ.