Rennes

Rennes is a city in the east of Brittany, in north-western France, standing where the rivers Ille and Vilaine meet. It is the prefecture of both the Brittany region and the Ille-et-Vilaine department. The city had 230,890 inhabitants in 2023, and its wider metropolitan area, with 789,516 people, is the tenth most populated in France. Its history reaches back more than two thousand years to a small Gallic village called Condate, and with Vannes and Nantes it was one of the major cities of the old Duchy of Brittany. From the early sixteenth century until the French Revolution it served as the parliamentary, administrative and garrison city of the province, and the 17th-century Parliament's Palace survives from that period. A fire in 1720 destroyed much of the medieval wooden centre, which was partly rebuilt in stone. The city stayed largely rural until the Second World War, then grew quickly, notably in telecommunications and high technology, and from 2002 to 2008 it was the smallest city in the world with a metro. More than 70,000 students study there.