Montluçon: The Castle of the Dukes of Bourbon and 3,500 Instruments at the MuPop

Required Activities

• Climb the old streets to the esplanade of the castle of the dukes of Bourbon, where flint tools twelve thousand years old have been dug out of the ground, and look out over the Cher from the one spot in Montluçon that has been occupied in every age since

• Work the MuPop's 200 listening points, and track the museum's own history through its cases: it began in the 1960s as a museum of the vielle alone, then took in bagpipes, then electric guitars — find a hurdy-gurdy and an electric guitar and decide which one the building was really built for

• In the church of Notre-Dame on its own square, find the north apsidal chapel — late 12th-century masonry left standing from the Romanesque church when Louis II rebuilt the rest in the 15th and 16th centuries on the same east–west line

• From the street outside the MuPop, compare its two old town houses: the hôtel Charnisay restored as it stood, and the hôtel Méchain wrapped in a modern skin because too little of it had survived, with a concrete entrance block bridging the two