Start from 84 curated places around Bordeaux, FR, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Kedem
A compact counter-style bistro where two chefs with Parisian fine-dining backgrounds serve Levantine food rooted in house-baked Yemeni kubaneh bread and Persian spice blends. Every meal starts with a mezze spread and moves toward slow-cooked meats or market-driven fish with North African accents. Michelin Bib Gourmand 2025, and one of the tightest tickets in the city.
Berthus
A former art gallery in the Saint-Pierre cobblestone grid, Berthus puts out three-course bistronomy menus at a fixed price that beats anything comparable in the city. The cooking leans Southwest French with seasonal pivots — think duck preparations, market vegetables, and desserts that show real pastry chops. Rated 4.7 on Google with thousands of reviews, and run by a husband-and-wife team who keep service personal.
Trails & outdoors
Promenade des Quais — Place de la Bourse to Bassins a Flot
The 3.5-kilometer left-bank riverside promenade along the UNESCO World Heritage quais, from the Place de la Bourse north to the Cite du Vin — a walk that covers the entire arc of Bordeaux's maritime history in order: medieval gates, 18th-century exchange buildings, wine-merchant warehouses, and finally the Bacalan submarine base turned art center. Flat, paved, and spectacular.
Le Tour du Parc Bordelais
A 1.8-kilometer loop through the Parc Bordelais, Bordeaux's largest urban green space — a 28-hectare Victorian park designed by the same landscape architect who drew from Haussmann's Paris parks, with an English-style river, lake, shaded path network, and a one-hectare rose garden. AllTrails rated 4.4 from 230 reviews. The right short urban trail for a morning when you want trees rather than cobblestones.
Things to do
La Cite du Vin
The world's first museum of wine culture, in a building shaped to evoke a swirling glass decanter, with 20 themed rooms covering 8,000 years of wine's relationship to civilization, architecture, trade, and art. The visit ends with a free glass of wine on the 8th-floor Belvedere terrace with a 360-degree view of the city. National Geographic rates it among the world's top 10 museums.
Bassins des Lumieres
Inside a wartime submarine base — four pools, 12,000 square meters of projection surface, 90 video projectors — the world's largest digital art center runs monumental immersive exhibitions that change quarterly and have ranged from Cezanne to Klimt to Egyptian pharaohs. The scale of the former submarine pens is as much the experience as the projected art.
Landmarks & sights
Place de la Bourse et Miroir d'Eau
The most-photographed sequence in Bordeaux — the 18th-century trading exchange building facing a 3,450 square-meter reflecting pool that alternates between still mirror and fog eruption every 15 minutes. The city restored the quayside specifically to expose this relationship between the classical facade and the water. Early morning before 8am, when the quai is empty and the light comes off the river at an angle, is the right time.
Cathédrale Saint-André et Tour Pey-Berland
Bordeaux's Gothic cathedral, with construction spanning the 11th through 15th centuries and one of the largest organs in France inside, stands as the city's structural anchor. The Tour Pey-Berland — a freestanding bell tower built between 1440 and 1500 — offers 230 spiral steps and a sweeping view over the entire city that the cathedral itself cannot provide. The two are separate monuments within 30 meters of each other.