Start from 33 curated places around Avignon, FR, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
La Mirande
The restaurant inside the five-star Hôtel La Mirande occupies a cardinal's palace directly adjacent to the Palais des Papes — Gobelins tapestries, painted ceilings, candlelight, and Provençal cooking with serious luxury ingredients. This is a special-occasion dinner for a very specific mood: formal, historic, expensive, and genuinely beautiful. The hotel also runs market-cooking classes in its professional kitchen that are one of the better half-day activities in the city.
Christian Etienne
The most serious restaurant in Avignon, in a 12th-century palace directly abutting the walls of the Palais des Papes — the medieval vaulted dining room alone is worth booking for. Etienne built his reputation on Provençal cooking of unusual purity: summer truffle, melon from Cavaillon, tomatoes treated as seriously as meat. The summer tomato tasting menu has become legendary: a multi-course meal devoted entirely to Provençal tomatoes in their season, with dozens of varieties from amuse-bouche to dessert. The wine list covers the southern Rhône properly.
Trails & outdoors
Tour des Remparts d'Avignon
The medieval ramparts encircling Avignon are among the best-preserved city walls in Europe, and the footpath running along their base makes a satisfying 4.3-kilometre urban circuit. Built in the 14th century under Pope Innocent VI, the walls run nearly five kilometres with 39 towers and seven gates, each with its own history. The walk takes 90 minutes at a leisurely pace and passes through changing neighbourhoods: tourist bustle near the Porte de l'Oulle, quieter residential streets near the Porte Saint-Lazare. The floodlit night circuit is worth doing once.
Île de la Barthelasse Circuit
The large river island in the Rhône between Avignon and Villeneuve is mostly farmland and orchards, crossed by flat cycling and walking paths with continuous views across to the city walls and Palais des Papes. A circuit of the island runs about 12 kilometres and takes two to three hours on foot, considerably less by bike. Almost no cars, almost no tourists. The free petit bac ferry from Porte de l'Oulle drops you onto the southern tip — the crossing alone is worth it.
Things to do
Festival d'Avignon
Every July, Avignon becomes the most important theatre festival in Europe: 50+ official 'In' productions and hundreds more at the Festival OFF, the fringe that now dwarfs the main programme. The Cour d'Honneur of the Palais des Papes is the main stage, and seeing theatre performed there under an open sky against that Gothic backdrop is a singular experience regardless of what's playing. The city's population triples. Every street fills with performers, flyerers, and audiences at all hours.
Opéra Grand Avignon
A handsome Second Empire opera house built in 1847, anchoring the Place de l'Horloge at the city's social heart. The gilded auditorium, painted ceiling, and red velvet seats provide an opulent backdrop for a year-round programme of opera, ballet, orchestral concerts, and operetta. Tickets are remarkably affordable by Paris or London standards — a decent seat for opera often costs less than a film elsewhere in Europe. The room is as much of an attraction as the performances.
Landmarks & sights
Palais des Papes
This is the biggest Gothic palace ever built, and for four decades in the 14th century it was the most powerful address in Christendom — seven popes ruled from here instead of Rome. The scale is hard to prepare for: the Grand Tinel banqueting hall alone runs 52 metres. Go early before the tour groups arrive, follow the audio guide into the private papal chambers, and look for the frescoes by Matteo Giovannetti that still glow in the Chambre du Cerf. The place feels simultaneously ruined and overwhelming, which is exactly what it should feel like.
Pont Saint-Bénézet
Only four of the original 22 arches survive, jutting into the Rhône and stopping dramatically mid-river — which makes it far more evocative than a complete bridge would be. The song has been lodged in everyone's head since childhood, but the real history (pilgrimage route, seven floods, centuries of abandonment) is more interesting than the nursery rhyme. Walk out to the end of the surviving spans for the view back at the ramparts, then go look at it from above in the Rocher des Doms garden — the elevated angle is the better photograph.