Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802, and so were the Lumière brothers, the pioneers of cinema, a generation later. The capital of Franche-Comté sits in a tight loop of the river Doubs, with the old town on the peninsula inside the loop and the citadel on a rock at the neck, closing the only side not protected by water. The citadel was built by Vauban, Louis XIV's great military engineer, after the French conquest of the region in the late seventeenth century, and it is one of the twelve groups of Fortifications of Vauban listed by UNESCO in 2008.
The citadel is a massive complex of walls, bastions and buildings perched above the river, with views over the old town and the Doubs valley. It houses several museums, including a museum of the Resistance and Deportation, and a zoo. Down in the old town, the streets are lined with elegant buildings of grey-blue and ochre stone, and the town is known for watchmaking, with an astronomical clock in the cathedral and a museum of time.
For riders, Besançon is a good base for exploring the Jura and the valleys of Franche-Comté. The Doubs valley, upstream toward Ornans and beyond, and the Loue valley, with its spectacular source gushing from a cliff, offer winding roads through limestone gorges, forests and pastures. Ornans, the birthplace of the painter Gustave Courbet, is a charming town on the Loue, with houses built over the river. Further south and east, the roads climb onto the high plateaus of the Jura, with long, sweeping bends through forests and pastures where Montbéliarde cows graze.
The city itself has heavy traffic and a complex road system, and the old town is partly restricted, so park and walk. The roads up to the citadel are steep and narrow.
Besançon, a city of over a hundred thousand people about two kilometres away, has fuel, shops and restaurants of every kind. Franche-Comté is famous for its cheeses, especially Comté, aged for months in cellars and with a rich, nutty flavour, and Mont d'Or, a soft cheese in a spruce box, eaten warm in winter. The Morteau sausage, smoked over resinous wood, is another speciality. Try them all with a glass of vin jaune, the extraordinary yellow wine of the Jura, aged under a layer of yeast for more than six years, and raise a toast to Hugo and the Lumières.