Pontarlier: The Capital of Absinthe

Required Activities

• On the half-hour tour of the Distillerie Pierre Guy, follow the maceration and distillation of the plants through to the traditional absinthe recipe the house brought back in December 2001, and taste the Pontarlier anise aperitif beside it

• In the museum, housed in a fifteenth-century town house, work through the absinthe room and find the story of 11 August 1901, when lightning set the Pernod works alight, the vats of spirit were opened into the Doubs, and the absinthe reappearing downstream proved that the Loue rises from the Doubs

• At the Fromagerie Badoz, buy Comté at any time of year and, if you are here between autumn and spring, a Mont d'Or in its spruce box: the strap round it is a 33 mm band of spruce inner bark, the same width as the spoon you eat it with, and it runs from 42 cm on a two-person cheese up to a metre on a two-kilo wheel

• Walk the main street to the porte Saint-Pierre, the triumphal arch raised between 1771 and 1773 to mark the town's rebuilding after its fires, then go into Saint-Bénigne, rebuilt between 1651 and 1666 under an imperial-dome belfry, and find the twentieth-century windows signed by Alfred Manessier

• Drive or walk up to the fort Catinat and the fort Mahler above the town, built into the Séré de Rivières system and later the Maginot Line, and from them look down the cluse de Pontarlier that they defended against the German invasion in 1940 — the same gap the Franco-Swiss Route de l'absinthe runs through