First Sunday free museums NOT in Paris

Your odds of finding people here who have been lucky enough to hit the one-day-a-month free day and remember the occasion may not be great. I go to a lot of museums but don't usually remember whether I stumbled on a special opportunity like that, especially in a smaller city where the museums are likely to be pretty inexpensive.

Museum websites indicate free-visit periods, so you may need to start with a list of museums of interest in the area you plan to visit and research from there. I don't know what type of museums you're interested in (art? history? other?), but check TripAdvisor's Things to Do lists for Toulouse, Albi (which has the excellent Toulouse-Lautrec Museum), Collioure (modern-art museum), Ceret (ditto) and Narbonne. If you Google something like Museums Narbonne, the major places will probably show up, and you can find their websites with info on free days.

I haven't been to the Dordogne, so I have no idea what the museum-going options are like there. If you're going to be in Bordeaux, I'm sure there are possibilities there.

My experience is free Sundays for public museums are common in French cities. Private museums don't have free Sundays as far as I know. In your area the Toulouse Lautrec museum in Albi might be an option? I was just in the area in June but I didn't visit a lot of major museums. Toulouse probably has something related to aerospace since it's a big Airbus town. I'm sure there are others. Bordeaux also has museums if you get there. Chateau Comtal in the cite of Carcassonne may have free Sundays?

We just stumbled on the free Sunday at the Chagall museum in Nice this last week. I have to say that I would rather have paid and had a quieter experience. It was still a great museum. It may be nice to save 10 euro but if you've just spent thousands to get there, you might as well enjoy it.

That's so frustrating, Karen. Unless it happens to be mentioned in your guide book, it's hard to guess whether a particular museum will get blasted during the free-admission period. I would have guessed it wouldn't be a major issue at the Chagall Museum; clearly I would have been wrong.

My experience is that a free day is a good day to skip that museum, unless it is a serious out of the mainstream place...something like the museum of bedpans of the mid 18th century, that you would not visit otherwise.

Any other place, visiting a museum when it fits your schedule is best, if you have to pay, figure you are supporting a cause for a minimal cost to you that preserves that place for future generations.

Agree that I would prefer paying €10 to see a great museum without the massive crowds of "free" days -- especially if it's a main reason for visiting that city, as the Chagall museum in Nice was for me. We did visit the Boboli Gardens in Florence on a free May 1, but that was largely because it was one of the few sights in Florence that was open on the holiday.