Limoges is the kind of French city that tends to be dismissed by travellers in a hurry — a modest prefectural town on the western slopes of the Massif Central, more familiar as an adjective than as a destination. That is their loss. The city has a fine Gothic cathedral, a museum of porcelain that is among the best of its kind in the world, and an old town of real character built on the hinge between two ancient rival settlements.
The city's worldwide reputation rests on its porcelain. Limoges porcelain has been made here since 1771, when kaolin — the pure white clay necessary for true hard-paste porcelain — was discovered near Limoges by a local surgeon's wife. Within decades the city's kilns were challenging Sèvres for the French fine china trade, and Limoges porcelain became synonymous with quality worldwide. The Musée national Adrien Dubouché holds an outstanding collection tracing the history of ceramics from antiquity to the present, with particular strength in the Limoges tradition.
The Cathédrale Saint-Étienne took six centuries to build — begun in 1273 and not finished until 1888 — and the result is a long, soaring Gothic nave that is considerably more impressive than the modest size of the city might suggest. The bishop's garden behind the cathedral, the Jardin de l'Évêché, steps down to the Vienne river in formal terraces and is one of the most attractive public gardens in the region.
The old town occupies what were historically two separate communities — the Cité, centred on the cathedral, and the Château, centred on the market and the Abbaye Saint-Martial to the north. The border between them ran along what is now the Rue du Consulat, and you can still feel the difference in character between the two areas as you walk from one to the other.