Montauban couldn't be easier to find your way around. The greatest delight is simply to wander the streets of the city centre, with their lovely pink brick houses; the town is only a ten- or fifteen-minute stroll from end to end. The visitable part is the small kernel of central streets based on the original bastide, and is enclosed within an inner ring of boulevards between boulevard Midi-Pyrénées on the east and the river on the west. The finest point of all is the place Nationale, rebuilt after a fire in the seventeenth century and surrounded on all sides by exquisite double-vaulted arcades with the octagonal belfry of St-Jacques showing above the western rooftops. It's the hub of the city's social life and the first place to head for coffee, drinks or food.The adjacent place du Coq on rue de la République is also pretty, and if you follow the street down it brings you out by the church of St-Jacques (first built in the thirteenth century on the pilgrim route to Compostela) and the end of the Pont-Vieux with a wide view of the river. At the near end of the bridge, the former bishop's residence is a massive half-palace, half-fortress, begun by the Black Prince in 1363 but never finished because the English lost control of the town. It's now the Musée Ingres (Easter to June & 1–15 Sept Tues–Sat 10am–noon & 2–6pm, Sun 2–6pm; July & Aug daily 9.30am–noon & 1.30–6pm; Sept–Easter Tues–Sun 10am–noon & 2–6pm; €4), so called because it houses drawings and paintings that Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a native of Montauban, left to the city on his death. It's a collection the city is very proud of, but unlikely to be of great interest to anyone but a definite Ingres fan. The same is true of the substantial collection of the works of Bourdelle, the ubiquitous monumental sculptor, also a native. There's a gruesome item in the middle of the basement room, known as a banc de question, used for extracting confessions by torture in the Montauban courts. The Cathédrale Notre-Dame, ten minutes' walk up rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, is a cold fish: an austere and unsympathetic building erected just before 1700 as part of the triumphalist campaign to reassert the glories of the Catholic faith after the cruel defeat and repression of the Protestants. But it's a bit of an architectural rarity in France, where there are few cathedrals built in the classical style.
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