Agen, France Hotels, Vacations, Tourism

AGEN , capital of the Lot-et-Garonne département , is a more pleasant town than it first appears. It was quartered by modern boulevards in the nineteenth century in its own version of a Haussmann clean-up, and it's down these roads that you're funnelled into the town, with the result that you see nothing of interest. The town lies on the broad, powerful River Garonne halfway between Bordeaux and Toulouse, and lived through the Middle Ages racked by war with England and internecine strife between Catholics and Protestants. But it was able to extract some advantage from disputes as it seesawed between … more »