Explore Lille

The Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille is the city's museum of fine arts, founded in 1809 and housed since 1892 in a palace on Place de la République designed by Édouard Bérard and Fernand Delmas. Its collections include paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Goya, Delacroix and Courbet, 19th-century sculpture and 18th-century relief models of fortified towns.

The Grand Place, officially Place du Général-de-Gaulle, is Lille's historic main square, laid out as a market place in the Middle Ages. It is framed by Flemish-style facades including the 17th-century Vieille Bourse and the Théâtre du Nord, and at its centre stands the Column of the Goddess, raised in 1845 to honour the city's resistance in the siege of 1792.

The Vieille Bourse is Lille's former merchants' exchange, built in 1652–1653 to plans by Julien Destrée while the city was under Spanish rule. Its carved and painted Flemish Renaissance facades belong to a ring of identical houses around an arcaded courtyard, where second-hand booksellers, flower sellers and chess players gather.

The Church of Saint-Maurice is a Gothic hall church in the centre of Lille, built in stages from the late 14th century to the 1870s. Its nave and four aisles rise to the same height, and an ambulatory with radiating chapels closes the east end. The city architect Philippe Cannissié added the western bays and the bell tower with its openwork spire in 1867–1877.

Lille Cathedral, Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille, is a Gothic Revival church begun in 1854 to house a 12th-century statue of the Virgin long venerated in the city. Built in stages over almost 150 years, it became a cathedral in 1913, and its modern west front, designed by architect Pierre-Louis Carlier with engineer Peter Rice, was completed in 1999.

The Hospice Comtesse is a former hospital in Old Lille, founded in 1237 by Joan, Countess of Flanders. Rebuilt after fires in 1468 and 1649, its brick buildings around a cobbled courtyard include the patients' hall with its wooden ceiling and a 17th-century chapel. Since 1962 it has been a museum of Flemish furniture, paintings, tapestries and life in old Lille.

The Citadel of Lille is a pentagonal fortress built from 1667 to 1670 to plans by Vauban after Louis XIV took the city, and Vauban called it the queen of citadels. It still houses an army headquarters, so the interior is closed to casual visitors; the moats, brick ramparts and the Porte Royale gate can be seen from the surrounding park.

The Birthplace of Charles de Gaulle is the town house at 9 rue Princesse in Old Lille where the future general and president was born on 22 November 1890, in the home of his maternal grandparents. Opened as a museum in 1983, it shows rooms furnished as in the late 19th century and traces his family, childhood and career.

Villa Cavrois is a modernist country house in Croix, near Roubaix, designed by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for the textile manufacturer Paul Cavrois and completed in 1932. Its long yellow-brick façades look onto a park with a water mirror; the state restored the house and its interiors and opened it to visitors in 2015.