Tourist Attractions in Bordeaux: Reviews and Recommendations
Bordeaux’s Bassins Lumières. August 9, 2021.
Though I’d venture that most people stay in Bordeaux, the city, as a base of stay for visiting the wineries in the surrounding region of the same name, the city has several museums and attractions for people who either need a break from vineyard-hopping (if wine-loving people have these types of days) or who plan to skip the wineries entirely and focus on the urban area.
If you fit into one of these categories, I’ve run through the activities and sites we visited while in Bordeaux, along with my reviews of each. (And if you’d like to start with planning your overall vacation, read my article on organizing your trip to Bordeaux.)
And you know I don’t pull my punches, right?
Reviews of Museums We Visited in Bordeaux
Bordeaux’s flagship museum is the Cité du Vin, a monument to all things wine, housed in a building designed to look like a wine decanter on the far northern reaches of the city in a highly industrial quarter (not far from the site of the Bassins Lumieres, described below).
The museum covers wine consumption and manufacturing throughout history and across regions, discusses the use of wine in religion and culture, and aims to teach visitors about the different sensory aspects of wine, from its look to its smell.
To achieve this, the museum gives each guest a device to point at buttons scattered throughout the several floors of exhibits that link to different videos, audio recordings, and graphical tableaux. The devices then translate the audio involved into your chosen language.
At the museum entrance, I asked for a device in English, as I worried that my French wouldn’t carry me through technical discussions of wine. Alas, I found the audio halting and awkward, due to lengthy pauses required to allow the video to catch up with the more efficient (I suppose) English phrasing over the French original versions.
Further, I found it frustrating to join a video in progress—watching the tail end of something launched by someone else watching the same video—waiting for the presentation to loop back to the beginning.
In the end, I had the impression that I’d have had a better experience watching a set of curated videos on-line from the comfort of home. The “experience” felt like exactly that—an experience—rather than something interesting and informative.
And if you want to provide an experience, it had better be a good one. This wasn’t.
I hope the Cité du Vin format isn’t a gimmick in museum design that catches on elsewhere, because my love for museums will quickly fade if it is.
However, a caveat: Arnaud and his mother enjoyed the Cité du Vin, as have other people I know who have visited it. I’m the outlier here, not the norm.
Therefore, don’t hesitate to go to the Cité du Vin when in Bordeaux—and, frankly, you may feel you didn’t see Bordeaux if you don’t go. Even though I didn’t like it, I’d have felt like I’d missed something if I hadn’t paid this place a visit. Just go in the morning as early as you can, for fewer crowds (and to give yourself prime place for initiating each video, rather than joining it midstream).
The city’s Musée d’Aquitaine, highly recommended by Bordeaux fans and tourist guides alike, could easily take a full day if you let it. The museum covers the history of the region from prehistoric periods through the 21st century—not a mean feat.
If you decide to visit—and I recommend you do—determine which sections interest you the most and focus your time in these areas. Otherwise, you’ll drown in the history of the first few rooms and have no attention span or thinking space left for the later sections of the museum. Typically, I use this strategy with history museums, but I forgot it when we visited the Musée d’Aquitaine. This meant that, by the time I reached the sections on the Middle Ages and Renaissance and then the very interesting exhibits covering the Bordeaux region’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, I had to repeatedly force myself from skimming to ensure I didn’t miss out on my areas of interest.
The museum’s section on the slave trade in France, and particularly in Bordeaux, has a lot to offer in terms of information and perspectives—and could even have offered more depth, in my opinion. However, the section on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance felt a little thin, especially given the city’s connection to noted Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, the historian and philosopher Montesquieu, and the naming of the museum after Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Mainly because we could see it on the way back from the Musée d’Aquitaine to our rental apartment, we could cover it in a short time, and the topic—the history of customs and customs officers in France—interested Arnaud’s mother, we visited the Musée National des Douanes while in Bordeaux.
The small museum has several exhibits spread across the bottom of the large, centrally located historic building called the Hôtel des Fermes bordering the Place de la Bourse. (“Bourse” means “purse” in French, and this river-fronting square welcomed cargo boats filled with goods in the 18th and 19th century—making the name of the square and the location of the museum very apt, indeed.)
The exhibits address the role of the customs office and customs officers today and in the past, presenting some of their current and former uniforms and illustrations and videos of customs functions at work.
Though Arnaud’s mother enjoyed it, I can’t particularly recommend the Musée National des Douanes, not finding the history of the customs service particularly interesting—or, perhaps, its presentation here particularly engaging.
Recommendations for Sites and Activities in Bordeaux
The city-overview walking tour offered by the Bordeaux Tourist Office will take you through most of the major architectural highlights of Bordeaux, from the famed Grand Théâtre, to the Place de la Bourse, to the Place du Parlement, to the Esplanade des Quinconces and its monument to the Girondins, and on through to the Place Gambetta.
Via this two-hour tour, you’ll get a good synopsis of the history of the city and the reasons for its layout and architecture—and the context will help you immensely as you explore Bordeaux independently during your visit.
On the walking tour, you’ll pass by the Porte de la Grosse Cloche and the Porte Cailhau. You can return to both structures later in your Bordeaux visit to climb to their top levels. Though neither tower rises very high, both give you a nice vantage point for the areas of Bordeaux in which they sit.
The Porte de la Grosse Cloche in Bordeaux, France. August 4, 2021.
The Porte de la Grosse Cloche doesn’t offer a ton to see on the interior—this structure’s allure comes from the gorgeous medieval clock featured on its front—the Porte Cailhau served as a door in the city’s former defensive wall during the early French Renaissance and the interior provides not only a view of the area but a very nice history of the building’s role and function during its time in operation.
The Porte Cailhau in Bordeaux, France. August 7, 2021.
If you love to climb structures to view places from on high, the Flèche Saint-Michel might interest you as well. The Église Saint-Michel, situated nearby, doesn’t have its spire and clock-tower attached to its roof, but situated not far from it in the same overall urban square. (You’ll see the same arrangement with Bordeaux’s Tour Pey-Berland, which accompanies the adjacent Cathédrale Saint-André.)
Not long ago, the spire for Saint Michael had a macabre display of mummies previously found in a graveyard displayed at the basement level, but they’ve since gotten a reburial. However, your ticket price includes a video about the former mummy exhibit (with photos of and testimonials) that you can view before or after you climb the spire.
A view of Bordeaux, France, from the Flèche Saint-Michel. August 7, 2021.
A view of Bordeaux, France, from the Flèche Saint-Michel. August 7, 2021.
Personally, though I love the pictures and the view I got from the Flèche Saint-Michel, I found the mummies video depressing and the overall spire itself dirty, dusty, and lacking interest (even from the city-view perspective). If you decide to skip it, I’ll understand.
Though Bordeaux has no shortage of large and imposing churches, its most renowned is the Cathédrale Saint-André. Though not one of my favorite French cathedrals to date, I couldn’t resist popping in to look—and I recommend that you do as well. A visit provides a nice opportunity to admire a church recently renovated that first broke ground in the 13th century.
A view of the magnificent stained glass and restored painted vaults in the Cathédrale Saint-André in Bordeaux, France. August 4, 2021.
Up the river a bit, you’ll find Bordeaux’s much-lauded Mirror d’Eau. A thin layer of water that reflects the architecture of the Place de la Bourse behind it covers this large dark-granite rectangle along the River Garonne, from which shoots of water periodically appear. In the heat of summer, kids will love it—as they do all types of water features like this one.
Astoundingly special and unlike anything you’ve ever seen? Not quite. But if you need something to do with kids on a hot summer day, the Mirror d’Eau could serve the purpose.
Speaking of water, the city has an activity called Bassins Lumières housed in a part of its former submarine factory and base, which the Germans established during their Bordelaise occupation of World War II. Your ticket plunges you into a show that plays out across the interior walls and remaining water pools in the former submarine base; we saw a show focused on impressionist painters (as you can see from the photos).
These types of lighting shows using interior and exterior spaces and audio presentations have become increasingly popular in recent years; I saw one in Houston nearly a decade ago that really impressed me, as I hadn’t seen anything like it at that time. If I hadn’t seen several similar shows since that one before seeing the Bassins Lumières, I may have felt a greater “wow factor” here in Bordeaux. However, I still highly enjoyed the show and recommend it, especially if you haven’t experienced something like this before.
One word of caution, however: The Bassins Lumières program requires a plunge into darkness for the light show’s full effects. The need to navigate in the darkness amid moving lights while wandering between the experience’s different rooms could pose problems for people with vision and balance challenges.
A snapshot from Bordeaux’s Bassins Lumières. August 9, 2021.
A snapshot from Bordeaux’s Bassins Lumières. August 9, 2021.
A snapshot from Bordeaux’s Bassins Lumières. August 9, 2021.
Via a short walk after you cross the Pont Jacques-Chaban Delmas near the Bassins Lumières and the Cité du Vin, you’ll find a developing cooperative community called Darwin that’s received a great deal of interest since its founding in the 2000s.
The community focuses on durable development, social entrepreneurism, and environmental respect. It features a few stores, a couple of restaurants, and a coworking space and skatepark available to visitors, with more in development. You can get a guided tour of Darwin from the Bordeaux tourist office or visit it on your own.
Darwin won’t blow you away with its beauty—even of the quirky variety—and you likely won’t return during your Bordeaux stay just for its stores or the restaurants, but heading across the Garonne to explore a bit will give you an entirely different perspective on the city, which has mainly developed on the other side of the river.
Don’t Just Sleep in a Base of Stay—Visit It!
Even if you use the city of Bordeaux as a base of stay for touring the wineries in the region, you should probably spend a bit of time in the place itself to do it justice as a place you’ve visited, rather than as a place where you simply crashed at night before hitting the road for the next vineyard the following morning.
The good news—or bad news, depending on your perspective—is that you won’t need to spend too much time in Bordeaux proper to feel like you’ve seen its major permanent tourist sites.
Of course, a city of the size and vibrant local community of Bordeaux’s will have several temporary activities to offer as well: Check the local listings for things that could interest you while in town.
And even if you decide to spend most of your time at the wineries and return to Bordeaux only in the evenings, don’t neglect to feast on some of the city’s amazing food. For tips on where and what to eat, check out my article with recommendations on don’t-miss treats and restaurants in Bordeaux. And if you’d like to take a few wine-free day trips around the city of Bordeaux, I have an article on that subject, too!