Toulouse, the summer the Musée des Augustins reopened

Toulouse has a colour the rest of France does not. The old city is built almost entirely from foundry-fired terracotta brick, and in the long light of a summer evening the whole place turns the warm pink that earned it the name la ville rose. Stand on Pont Neuf around nine o’clock in June, when the sun drops behind the dome of La Grave and the Garonne goes the colour of weak rosé, and you understand why southwest France treats this as its own quiet capital rather than a stop on the way to somewhere else.

This is also the first full summer in seven years that the city’s greatest museum is open. The Musée des Augustins — Toulouse’s fine-arts collection, housed inside a 14th-century Augustinian convent — closed in May 2019 and stayed shut through a €25m restoration. It reopened in December 2025. That single fact reshapes a Toulouse trip: the thing locals had spent six years missing is back, and most international visitors have never seen it at all.

The Augustins, finally

The reopening is the reason to go now. The City of Toulouse’s announcement sets out the scale of it — a six-year project to rethink a heritage building for the 21st century, with the south and west wings open first and the convent church folded into the route across 2026. The museum’s own walkthrough of its new face is the better read for what you will actually see: the redesigned galleries, the cleaned-up cloister, and the collection of Romanesque capitals and gargoyles that is the building’s real treasure. France Bleu’s report from reopening week captures the mood among Toulousains who had waited the whole closure out.

Go early in the day. The galleries are calm before eleven, and the gothic church space — all height and stone and filtered light — rewards an empty room. The great cloister, the part still being finished into spring 2027, is worth a slow circuit even mid-works; it is one of the best-preserved in the southwest.

Walking the pink city

The Augustins sits a few minutes from Place du Capitole, the vast square at the centre of everything, fronted by the long neoclassical facade of the city hall. From there the old town folds out in lanes of brick and shuttered windows. Lonely Planet’s run-through of the city covers the essential stops — the square, the Romanesque mass of Basilique Saint-Sernin, the covered Marché Victor Hugo — and The Geographical Cure’s longer love letter to la ville rose is the one to read if you want the architecture and history behind the brick before you arrive.

Saint-Sernin earns the detour. It is one of the largest Romanesque churches in Europe, a thousand-year stop on the pilgrim road to Santiago, and its octagonal brick belltower is the silhouette you will keep seeing across the rooftops. Then there is the city’s other colour story: the candied violet and the blue dye of pastel, two trades that made Toulouse rich at different points in its history. Toulouse Tourisme’s guide to violets and pastel explains both, and La Maison de la Violette — a barge moored on the canal, selling violet syrup, liqueur and sweets — is the most charming place to buy the edible version.

The canal and the riverbank

Toulouse is the western terminus of the Canal du Midi, the 17th-century waterway that runs to the Mediterranean and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. In the city its plane-tree-shaded towpaths are where Toulouse goes to slow down — cyclists, joggers, students sprawled on the grass near Port Saint-Sauveur, a barge or two sliding past. The Canal du Midi’s own city guide lays out the walkable stretches and where to pick up a boat if you want an hour on the water.

The Garonne is the grander counterpoint. The riverbanks below Pont Neuf are the evening gathering spot, and the Prairie des Filtres — a wide riverside park on the left bank — is where you want to be for the sunset that turns the whole city pink. Bring a bottle and join everyone else.

Where to stay

Stay inside the old town and you will walk everywhere. Le Grand Balcon, a hundred metres off Place du Capitole, is the romantic choice — a 1930s-styled hotel that was home to the pilots of the Aéropostale mail service, Saint-Exupéry among them, and still leans into that aviation history. For something quieter and more indulgent, La Cour des Consuls occupies two 18th-century mansions in the Carmes quarter, with a courtyard brasserie and a spa built around the local pastel blue — 32 rooms, five stars, and a sense of being tucked away while still being five minutes from the squares.

Eating: the cassoulet question

You cannot leave without facing the cassoulet — the slow-cooked cassole of white beans, Toulouse sausage and duck confit that the city argues over the way other places argue about football. The Infatuation’s Toulouse restaurant guide is the sharpest overview of where to eat across the board, and Taste of Toulouse’s cassoulet rundown settles the where-to-go question, complete with the World Cassoulet Championship winners.

Two safe bets. Restaurant Émile on the tree-lined Place Saint-Georges has been a Toulouse institution since the 1940s; chef Christophe Fasan’s duck-confit version is reason enough to book a terrace table. Le Genty Magre is the ten-table room in the old town where chef Romain Brard’s cassoulet has taken the city championship — more refined, harder to get into, worth the effort. Either way, order it at lunch. It is not a dish that leaves room for an evening.

Two films that capture the place

Before you go, two walks that show the colour and the rhythm better than any photograph:

Practical notes

Toulouse-Blagnac (TLS) has direct flights from most European hubs and sits a 20-minute tram ride from the centre on line T2. The TGV from Paris takes a little over four hours; from Bordeaux it is barely two. Inside the city you will not need much beyond your feet — the metro’s two lines and the tram cover the gaps, and a single ticket works across all of it.

The aerospace sites are the one thing worth planning around, because they sit apart. Cité de l’espace, the space park with its full-scale Ariane 5 and a planetarium, is on the eastern edge and best reached by bus line 37 — book online in high season. The Aeroscopia museum, with its Concorde and Super Guppy, sits beside the Airbus factory at Blagnac on tram T2, and Toulouse Tourisme’s aerospace-capital page is the place to line up the factory-line tour tickets, which sell out furthest ahead. Give each half a day; do not try to fold both into one.

The Augustins is open for the first summer in seven years, the violet barge is on the canal, and the cassoulet houses are taking terrace bookings. Our Toulouse collection gathers the museum’s reopening, Saint-Sernin, the Canal du Midi towpaths, the cassoulet shortlist at Émile and Le Genty Magre, and the Le Grand Balcon and Cour des Consuls hotels — save the Toulouse collection before the August heat and the Airbus-tour queues set in.

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