Ersilia | Travel in 🇫🇷 & 🇪🇺
If Taylor Swift Were French
10 places in France that match her eras — from the misty woods of Bretagne to the glittering nights of Paris
Every Taylor Swift album has a landscape. Folklore is a fog-shrouded cabin in the woods. Reputation is a rain-slicked city at 2am. Lover is a pastel carnival at golden hour. And when you start to travel through France, the uncanny thing is — you feel it. You feel her, somehow, in the light and the stone and the particular mood of a place.
I made this as a bit of a silly creative post on TikTok, pairing each of France’s iconic regions to a Taylor Swift era. The response it got told me something real: people experience places emotionally before they experience them practically. Before you know a train schedule or a restaurant name, you know a feeling. And Taylor Swift, above almost any other artist, has catalogued those feelings with obsessive precision.
So here it is — the definitive (if deeply unserious) guide to France, sorted by era. Whether you’re a Swiftie planning your first European trip or a traveller who just needs a new frame for the places you already love, this one’s for you.
I’m Ersilia – architect and travel lover
📍 Based in Toulouse, I’ve been uncovering castles, villages & hidden gems for years — and I share the ones I truly love.
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Bretagne
— Folklore —
There is nowhere in France more Folklore than Brittany. The album’s entire mood — melancholic, coastal, ancient, intimate — could have been written on a grey beach in Finistère, watching the Atlantic swallow the horizon. Bretagne is a place where history feels physically present: Neolithic standing stones in Carnac, Celtic languages still spoken in villages, myths of drowned cities beneath the sea.
The coastal towns like Concarneau and Pont-Aven have a particular withdrawn quality. The light is extraordinary and mournful. Forests here feel genuinely ancient — not manicured parkland, but actual old growth where you half-expect a figure from a myth to step out. If you’ve ever listened to “seven” and felt inexplicably sad about a childhood you may not have had, you understand exactly what I mean. Book a cottage near the coast in November. Bring the album. Bring a good raincoat.
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Alsace
— Evermore —
Where Folklore is solitary grief, Evermore is communal grief — winter hearths, family gatherings with unsaid things, the long aftermath. Alsace, with its half-timbered villages, its Christmas markets glowing amber in the cold, its position straddling France and Germany like a place that’s never quite sure where it belongs — this is Evermore made physical.
Colmar and Riquewihr in winter are genuinely overwhelming — beautiful in that way that makes you feel slightly heartbroken without knowing why. The wine here is Germanic in style (Riesling, Gewürztraminer), and the food is rich and warming and takes itself seriously. There’s something about this region that rewards slow travel: sitting in a warm restaurant while snow falls outside, drinking a glass of something excellent, listening to “champagne problems” for the fifteenth time.
The French Riviera
— 1989 —
Glossy, sun-drenched, effortlessly cool, and slightly untouchable — 1989 is the French Riviera of albums. It’s the one Taylor made in New York and Los Angeles but should have made in Antibes or Saint-Tropez, because nobody captures the specific feeling of expensive-looking fun better than this era.
The Riviera’s towns each have their own personality: Nice is genuinely urban and has an incredible old town; Èze is a perched medieval village that looks impossible; Antibes has the best market I’ve encountered anywhere in France. The Matisse Museum in Nice, the Picasso Museum in Antibes — the cultural density here is remarkable even beyond the obvious glamour. Come in May or September to avoid the August crush. Listen to “Style” while watching the Mediterranean turn gold at dusk. You’ll understand.
Paris
— Reputation —
This felt so obvious when I made the post that I almost didn’t include it, and then I realised — the obviousness IS the point. Of course Paris is Reputation. Reputation is an album about being perceived, about the performance of a self, about how image and reality blur. Paris is the city that has spent centuries curating its own mythology.
But the pairing goes deeper than aesthetics. Paris at night, especially along the Seine or in the backstreets of the Marais, has exactly Reputation’s energy: dark and glittering and unexpectedly tender once you get past the hard exterior. The city rewards people who refuse to be tourists — who sit in unremarkable cafés for three hours, who get lost on purpose, who don’t take photos of the Eiffel Tower but instead watch strangers taking photos of the Eiffel Tower. That’s the Reputation way. Don’t show them everything. Keep the good parts for later.
Provence
— Red —
Red is the most emotionally maximalist of Taylor’s albums — it swings between country heartbreak and stadium pop, between rage and nostalgia, between “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “The Last Time.” It is, in the best possible way, too much. Provence is, in the best possible way, too much.
The lavender fields in July are genuinely overwhelming. The light in the Luberon has been painted by Cézanne and Matisse and Van Gogh and still manages to surprise you. The food is extraordinary and takes forever. The roads through the Alpilles feel like driving through a painting and you keep having to stop because another view has ambushed you. The village of Les Baux-de-Provence looks like a fortress from a fairy tale. Gordes glows golden at sunset in a way that seems computationally generated. This is not a subtle region. It does not try to be. Red wouldn’t want it any other way.
The Loire Valley
— Lover —
Lover is whimsical and romantic and a bit over-the-top in the most intentional, charming way. It’s an album of fairy-tale logic: love as something transformative and magical and slightly unreal. The Loire Valley, with its extraordinary châteaux rising from garden landscapes, its rivers and light and general air of cultivated enchantment, is exactly this.
Château de Chambord is the most impossibly theatrical building I’ve ever stood in front of. Château de Chenonceau spans a river like something from a dream. Even the smaller, less famous châteaux — and there are hundreds — have this quality of preserved fantasy. The Loire is also seriously underrated as a cycling destination: the flat valley floor and the cycling paths that follow the river make it one of the most pleasant ways to spend a week in France. Very Lover energy. Effortless delight, excellent wine, no suffering required.
Annecy
— Speak Now —
Speak Now is the album Taylor wrote entirely alone, a theatrical, orchestral, slightly epic record full of grand gestures and sweeping emotion. It has mountains in it, metaphorically speaking. Annecy, with its turquoise lake ringed by Alps, its medieval old town reflected in canals, its general air of being almost too picturesque to be real, is Speak Now in stone and water.
The lake at Annecy is one of the clearest in Europe. In summer you can swim in it, surrounded by mountain reflections. The old town’s canals and geranium-hung bridges attract crowds for good reason, though early mornings are still surprisingly quiet and very beautiful. The surrounding mountains — the Aravis range, the Bauges massif — offer serious hiking above the tourist town below. There’s something about Annecy that rewards the grand gesture. It is a place for declarations, for arriving dramatically, for feeling like the protagonist of something larger than your life.
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Lyon
— Midnights —
Midnights is the most introspective of Taylor’s recent albums — witty, self-aware, 3am-brained, a little anxious, surprisingly funny. It’s an album about what you think about when you can’t sleep, which is either your worst regrets or your best jokes, often both simultaneously. Lyon is the most self-aware city in France. It knows exactly what it is and doesn’t need your approval.
Lyon is where serious people eat. The bouchons — Lyon’s traditional bistros — serve some of the most technically accomplished and genuinely satisfying food in the country without any of Paris’s performance. The Presqu’île, the peninsula between two rivers, has excellent nightlife. The Croix-Rousse neighbourhood, built on a hillside, has an artist-intellectual energy that feels genuinely earned. Lyon doesn’t show off. It’s been the gastronomic capital of France for centuries and doesn’t feel the need to announce it. Very Midnights. Confident in the dark.
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