🇫🇷Facts about France, for your next trip

France is the largest country in the European Union by land area and one of its two great political engines. It has spent centuries exporting its language, legal codes and ideas about citizenship, and it remains the most visited country on Earth, drawing close to 100 million travelers in a normal year.

Mainland France is divided into thirteen regions, with five more scattered across the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and South America. Île-de-France, the small ring around Paris, holds roughly a fifth of the population on about two percent of the land. Beyond it the country changes character quickly: wheat plains and cathedral towns in the north, château country along the Loire, volcanic uplands in the center, Provence and the Côte d’Azur on the Mediterranean, and the Alps and Pyrenees walling off the eastern and southwestern borders.

Paris dominates, but the other cities are distinct enough to be worth the journey on their own. Marseille is the oldest, founded by Greek sailors around 600 BC and still the country’s main port. Lyon claims the culinary crown, Bordeaux the wine trade, Toulouse the aerospace industry, and Strasbourg sits on the German border hosting the European Parliament. Visitors, and there are close to a hundred million of them a year, tend to come for some combination of the same four things: the museums and streets of Paris, the wine regions, the Mediterranean coast, and the food.