Mérignac

Mérignac is Bordeaux's western wing — literally. The city's airport lies here, and with it a century of French aviation: pioneers flew from Mérignac's fields before the First World War, and Dassault still assembles aircraft beside the runways, making the commune one of the aerospace capitals of the southwest. Around the industry spreads the largest suburb of the Bordeaux metropolis, a green checkerboard of parks, business quarters and neighbourhoods that grew from what were once vineyards and country estates — a handful of châteaux and their grounds survive as public parks, the Gironde's past kept as the city's lungs.

What distinguishes Mérignac culturally is that it refused to be a dormitory. The Espace culturel du Pin Galant, opened at the turn of the 1990s, is a genuine opera-scale house — some fourteen hundred seats — whose seasons run from symphony orchestras, opera and ballet to jazz, chanson and international touring productions, drawing audiences from the whole Bordeaux region. For a suburban commune to maintain a stage of this ambition is a statement of civic self-respect, and the Pin Galant has become one of the principal halls of the French southwest. Add a photography centre, festivals and the vine-scented proximity of the Médoc, and Mérignac emerges as its own address: the city where Bordeaux takes off, and where, most evenings, something is playing.