Lille

This default description comes from wikipedia
Lille ( LEEL; French: [lil] ; Dutch: Rijsel [risl]; Picard: Lile; West Flemish: Rysel) is a city in the northern part of France, within French Flanders. Positioned along the Dele river, near France's border with Belgium, it is the capital of the Hauts-de-France region, the prefecture of the Nord department, and the main city of the European Metropolis of Lille.The city of Lille proper had a population of 236,234 in 2020 within its small municipal territory of 35 km2 (14 sq mi), but together with its French suburbs and exurbs the Lille metropolitan area (French part only), which extends over 1,666 km2 (643 sq mi), had a population of 1,515,061 that same year (Jan. 2020 census), the fourth most populated in France after Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. The city of Lille and 94 suburban French municipalities have formed since 2015 the European Metropolis of Lille, an indirectly elected metropolitan authority now in charge of wider metropolitan issues, with a population of 1,182,250 at the Jan. 2020 census.More broadly, Lille belongs to a vast conurbation formed with the Belgian cities of Mouscron, Kortrijk, Tournai and Menin, which gave birth in January 2008 to the Eurometropolis LilleKortrijkTournai, the first European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), which has more than 2.1 million inhabitants.Nicknamed in France the "Capital of Flanders", Lille and its surroundings belong to the historical region of Romance Flanders, a former territory of the county of Flanders that is not part of the linguistic area of West Flanders. A garrison town (as evidenced by its Citadel), Lille has had an eventful history from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. Very often besieged during its history, it belonged successively to the Kingdom of France, the Burgundian State, the Holy Roman Empire of Germany and the Spanish Netherlands before being definitively attached to the France of Louis XIV following the War of Spanish Succession along with the entire territory making up the historic province of French Flanders.