The underrated, beautiful French city most visitors miss

Think of a city in the south of France beginning with an “M” and there’s a fair chance Marseille comes to mind. Oh oui, that’s a must-visit, but there’s another vibrant port city to stick on your itinerary.

Montpellier is 170 kilometres west of Marseille – 90 minutes away by rail – and also a stop on the high-speed TGV service between Paris and Barcelona. Yet, it’s largely ignored by overseas travellers, although it really shouldn’t be as it’s beautiful; buzzing yet easy-going, packed with antique and modern charms and edged by Languedoc vineyards that produce pale-pink rosés to rival those of neighbouring Provence.

Exiting Saint-Roch station – named after Montpellier’s patron saint – what immediately strikes you, apart from the colourful street trams, buttery limestone buildings and quirky new apartment blocks, is the city’s youthful zing. Students make up about a quarter of Montpellier’s 300,000 population. Their noses aren’t always buried in books – you’ll see sprightly hordes zipping around on bikes and e-scooters and eating, sipping, chatting and flirting on cafe terraces – but the students ensure Montpellier a reputation around France as a centre of learning.

The city was emerging as a trading hub for spices and textiles when its university was established in AD1220. Excelling in law and medicine, it later attracted inquisitive souls like Michel de Nostredame, the 16th-century astrologer, physician and apothecary better known as Nostradamus. Statues of esteemed alumni adorn university buildings, including the faculty of medicine, billed as the planet’s oldest practising medical school. It shoulders the gothic Saint-Pierre Cathedral, where Christian pilgrims prayed en route from Rome to Santiago de Compostela.

Here you’re at the northern tip of Montpellier’s tremendously walkable medieval core, L’Ecusson, which translates to “the shield” in French and is shaped rather like one. Within its sloping, labyrinthine limits, it hides everything from ancient Jewish bathhouses and groovy fashion stores to backstreet laundrettes and leafy cobbled squares made for long, wine-fuelled alfresco lunches or evening meals.

As well as French classics and Languedoc staples like cassoulet and tielle setoise (octopus and calamari pie), the city’s eateries reflect Montpellier’s melting pot with many chefs and diners tracing their roots to France’s former African, Asian and Caribbean colonies. There’s a cosmopolitan air too at the Jardin des Plantes, the nation’s oldest botanical garden, commissioned by King Henri IV in 1593. Its exotic herbs and plants bask in the city’s 2700 annual hours of sunshine (that’s slightly more than Sydney, which receives double Montpellier’s rainfall each year).

Unlike Sydney, Montpellier has a surprisingly low-key waterfront. Many tourists, in fact, never see the River Lez, which flows a kilometre east of L’Ecusson past Antigone, a neoclassical-style enclave created in the 1980s. Other offbeat contemporary buildings, including a shiny city hall by top French architect Jean Nouvel, catch the eye on the foot and bike paths flanking this heron-graced river, which slithers 11 kilometres to the Mediterranean Sea, where lagoons, salt marshes and sandy beaches sprawl.

To the south-east is the Camargue, a delta region famed for its cowboys, white horses and pink flamingos. It’s stunning, yet tricky to reach without your own wheels. But you can spot flamingos in the wetlands around Sete, a postcard-pretty fishing town 20 minutes by train from Saint-Roch station. From Montpellier, you can also rail it to nearby Nimes, which has an awesome ancient Roman amphitheatre plus shuttle buses to the Pont du Gard, a monumental aqueduct also dating from the first century AD.

Montpellier has its own marvellous aqueduct, constructed in the 1700s to bring fresh water from a spring in the outlying hills. A produce market pitches up under its arches on Tuesday and Saturday mornings. Another key city landmark is its Arc de Triomphe – smaller than the Parisian one, but more than 200 years older – while Musee Fabre is the pick of Montpellier’s art galleries, containing pieces by Rubens, Delacroix, Monet and more. It overlooks Esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle, a tree-lined promenade linked to Place de la Comedie, where, day and night, Montpellierains of all ages, and enchanted visitors like me, love to wander, dawdle and people-watch.