Toulouse
Toulouse ( too-LOOZ; French: [tuluz] ; Occitan: Tolosa [tuˈluzɔ] ) is a city in Southern France, the prefecture of the Haute-Garonne department and of the Occitania region. The city is on the banks of the River Garonne, 150 kilometres (93 miles) from the Mediterranean Sea, 230 km (143 mi) from the Atlantic Ocean and 680 km (420 mi) from Paris. It is the fourth-largest city in France after Paris, Marseille, and Lyon, with 514,819 inhabitants within its municipal boundaries (2023); its metropolitan area has a population of 1,529,112 inhabitants (2023), an increase of more than 110,000 since 2017.
Founded by the Romans on the banks of the Garonne, Toulouse was the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom in the 5th century, then the seat of the counts of Toulouse, whose court welcomed the troubadours. The Albigensian Crusade saw the founding of the Dominican Order in the city in 1215 and of the University of Toulouse in 1229, one of the oldest in Europe, before the county passed to the French crown. As capital of the province of Languedoc and seat of the kingdom's second parlement, Toulouse experienced a golden age in the 16th century thanks to the trade in woad, a blue dye. Long regarded as the unofficial capital of the cultural region of Occitania, it is now the capital of the administrative region of Occitania, the second largest region in Metropolitan France.
Toulouse has two UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Canal du Midi was designated in 1996, a listing shared with other cities. The Basilica of St. Sernin, one of the two largest surviving Romanesque churches in Europe, and the former hospital Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques were designated in 1998 as part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France. The city's architecture, largely built of terracotta brick in warm tones, is associated with its nickname La Ville rose ("The Pink city"). In 2023, Toulouse was named a UNESCO City of Music, joining UNESCO's Creative Cities Network, and in 2024 Lonely Planet ranked it first among the cities to visit in 2025.
Toulouse is the centre of the European aerospace industry, with the headquarters of Airbus, ATR and the Aerospace Valley. It hosts the CNES's Toulouse Space Centre, the largest national space centre in Europe, as well as the NATO space centre of excellence and the French Space Command. Its higher education institutions, attended by nearly 140,000 students, include the national schools of aeronautics and space (ISAE-SUPAERO) and of civil aviation (ENAC), as well as the Toulouse School of Economics, co-founded by Jean Tirole, winner of the 2014 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Toulouse has regularly topped the annual ranking of French student cities published by L'Étudiant, including in 2026. Since 2024, it has also ranked first among France's largest metropolitan areas in the annual attractiveness barometer of the real estate consultancy Arthur Loyd.
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