Mirande

Mirande is a bastide — one of the planned towns of the medieval southwest, founded in 1281 and laid out on a grid so rational that the streets still meet at right angles seven centuries later. At the centre, the arcaded Place d'Astarac keeps market days as it always has; beside it rises the fifteenth-century cathedral of Sainte-Marie, whose tower performs the town's best architectural joke — a belfry carried on an arch that stretches clean across the street, so the road to Tarbes passes under the church. This is deep Gascony, the Gers of d'Artagnan, foie gras and Armagnac, a countryside of hills that the town has represented since the counts of Astarac; the slow-food movement made it official when Mirande earned the international Cittaslow label for quality of life.

And then, each July, the bastide puts on boots. Mirande's country music festival — revived in its new form as The New Festival Country de Mirande — turns the town into France's largest gathering of the genre: five days of concerts, line dancing, rodeo and American cars among the Gascon arcades, a transatlantic carnival that the medieval grid absorbs with surprising ease. The rest of the year, the Salle André Beaudran serves as the municipal stage for concerts and local seasons. Jazz reigns up the road in Marciac; Mirande answered with Nashville — and the Gers, evidently, has room for both.