The most beautiful arenas in France, ranked by someone who grew up next to one

Which French city is known for its arena?

Two of them, and they are 30 minutes apart by train. Nîmes is the answer most people give, because its amphitheatre is generally called the best preserved in the world and stands with its full outer wall in the middle of a city. Arles is the answer I give, because ours is older by a whisker, longer by 3 m, wears three medieval towers, sits inside a UNESCO inscription with five other monuments and has the Théâtre antique 200 m away. I have put the two side by side, with the numbers, on Arles vs Nîmes.

How many bullrings does France have?

Roughly 80 to 90, depending on what you count as a ring rather than a portable set of barriers on a village square. They cluster in four regions: Provence and the Camargue, where the game is the bloodless course camarguaise as much as the corrida; Languedoc; Gascony; and the Basque Country. Seven are classed first-category for the corrida: Arles, Nîmes, Bayonne, Béziers, Dax, Mont-de-Marsan and Vic-Fezensac. That classification is about the spectacle, not the building; what a corrida and a course actually are is on corrida vs course camarguaise.

The Roman ones

About 400 Roman amphitheatres are known across the former empire and France has a good share. Besides Nîmes, Arles and Béziers, there are Roman amphitheatres, in varying states, at Fréjus, Saintes, Lyon (the amphitheatre of the Three Gauls), Périgueux, Bordeaux (the Palais Gallien), Autun, and in Paris, where the Arènes de Lutèce sit in a small park that most visitors to the city never find. None of those is a bullring. What sets the southern three apart is that they never stopped: Arles held its first modern course in 1830, the year the last houses were cleared from inside it, a story told on the history page.

My ranking

1. Nîmes. I am from Arles and I still put it first for the building alone. Two complete storeys of 60 arches, the attic, the full ring of 34 rows and a floor 68 by 38 m; nothing else in France shows you a Roman amphitheatre as a whole object.
2. Arles. Older, longer, less complete, more interesting. The towers tell you the building had a second life as a fortress and a town; the UNESCO group around it means you walk from arena to theatre to cloister in a morning; and the Cocarde d’Or in July is the best evening any French ring gives. On atmosphere, first. On stone, second.
3. Béziers. The Roman amphitheatre few visitors know about, and the one that completes the trio. Go if you are already in Languedoc.
4. Bayonne, Dax, Mont-de-Marsan, Vic-Fezensac. The four other first-category rings, in Gascony and the Basque Country. None of the four is a Roman building, and what makes them beautiful is the feria week around them rather than the architecture.
5. The Arènes de Lutèce, Paris. Not beautiful in the postcard sense, and I include it because it is the one Roman arena most visitors to France walk past without knowing.

Beauty here is doing two jobs. If you mean the most photogenic Roman stone, the order is Nîmes, Arles, Béziers. If you mean the place you would most want to be on a feria evening, I would put Arles first and I would not be alone; the 2026 dates are the reason to plan around it, or to plan away from it if you want the building empty.

Seeing the Arles arena with a local

You do not need a tour to get into any of these buildings, and none of the tours sold through this site includes a monument ticket. If you are in Arles for an hour, the express walk with a local host starts two minutes from the arena and is the simplest way I know of putting the building in context; if you are based in Aix, Marseille or Avignon, the day trips pair Arles with Les Baux and Saint-Rémy. They are all on the all tours page.

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