Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux › Nîmes
19 Nîmes has hosted the Tour de France 19 times in the past 116 years
5 Stage wins for Caleb Ewan, who won the last time the Tour visited Nîmes
162.5 The average distance in kilometres of Tour stages in 2021
For a city with a population of just 150,000, and historically a, commonly shortened to denim, we might not have had blue jeans. It was also the home of the 16th century physician Jean Nicot, who was the first to import tobacco to France, from Portugal. Nicot marketed the new drug as particularly effective against the plague. Nicot, though sadly misguided about the health-giving qualities of tobacco, was a classic polymath - he retired to land given to him by the French court and went on to write one of the first dictionaries.
