The Philadelphe Thomas natural history museum

You don’t expect to find a natural history museum in Gaillac — and yet it’s the only one in the Tarn, and the town’s oldest museum. It’s even described as the second natural history museum in the former Midi-Pyrénées region, after Toulouse.

A collector’s cabinet

It all begins with one man: Dr Philadelphe Thomas (1826-1912), a Gaillac physician and collector, whose natural history collections formed the museum’s core in the late nineteenth century. The place keeps the slightly old-fashioned, wholly assumed charm of the cabinets of curiosities of old: crowded display cases, handwritten labels, specimens from around the world. You step into it as into the collection of a nineteenth-century scholar — because that’s exactly what it is.

Two floors, from hummingbird to mammoth

The first floor is zoological: over six hundred stuffed European birds, with eggs, nests, reptiles, mammals, insects and fish. The second goes deep into time — palaeontology and mineralogy of the Tarn and Occitania: Quercy phosphorites, a mammoth bone, Pyrenean marbles, fossils by the thousand. It’s a short visit, ideal with children, and a radical change of register after the abbey’s sacred art or the Fine Arts’ painting.

The oddities

This is where the cabinet becomes irresistible. Between two cases of minerals, you come across a Goliath beetle, crocodiles, a hippopotamus, precious and semi-precious stones — and, the highlight, an Egyptian mummy some 2,500 years old. Enough to put paid, once and for all, to the idea that a provincial museum has to be tame.

The third of the three museums

The museum completes, with the Abbey museum and the Fine Arts museum, Gaillac’s three municipal museums. The single 8-euro pass opens all three, and on the second Sunday of each month the permanent collections are free. For a rainy afternoon with the family, chaining all three is unbeatable — and each tells a different facet of the town.