Lille

Lille is a city in the northern part of France, in French Flanders. On the river Deûle, 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, but together with its French suburbs and exurbs the Lille metropolitan area, which extends over 1,666 km2, had a population of 1,515,061 that same year, 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…