La Réole: Richard the Lionheart's Town Hall, the Benedictine Priory and the Garonne

Required Activities

• Stand under the vieille halle between the place du Loup and the place des Martyrs-de-la-Résistance and date it off its own stonework: Romanesque capitals, a flamboyant Gothic balcony and Renaissance mullioned windows in one building. The open ground floor was the grain market; the twelve jurats of the town held their assemblies in the great room above it

• In the priory, find the wrought-iron cloister door and the balcony and railings of the great staircase, all made by Blaise Charlut, the La Réole ironsmith who died here in 1792, and the three stone sarcophagi from the Merovingian burial ground set out in the cloister; then go into the church of Saint-Pierre next door, through its flamboyant Gothic portal, and find the organ that was taken away in 1812 and only put back in November 2015

• Walk down the steep lanes to the Garonne by way of the double porte du Sault, between the bottom of the rue André-Bénac and the steps to the garden below the town hall esplanade — the last of the fifteen gates the town once had — then find the three surviving towers of the Château des Quat'Sos, including la Thomasse on the south-west corner, left standing when Richelieu had the rest pulled down in 1629

• Ride the flat towpath greenway from the canal port at Fontet, La Réole's neighbouring commune across the Garonne, and count the locks and lock-keepers' houses you pass on the way downstream