Lot (department)
French department
Lot (French pronunciation: [lɔt]; Occitan: Òlt [ɔl]) is a department in the Occitanie region of France. Named after the river Lot, it lies in the southwestern part of the country and had a population of 176,473 in 2023. Its prefecture is Cahors; its subprefectures are Figeac and Gourdon.
History
Lot is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790. It was created from part of the province of Quercy. In 1808 some of the original southeastern cantons were separated from it to form the department of Tarn-et-Garonne. It originally extended much farther to the south and included the city of Montauban.
Geography
Lot is part of the region of Occitanie and is surrounded by the departments of Corrèze, Cantal, Aveyron, Tarn-et-Garonne, Lot-et-Garonne and Dordogne. It is named after the river Lot, which in its Occitan name is Olt.
Cahors is the prefecture of the department, lying in its southwestern part: a medieval cathedral town known internationally for its production of Cahors wine, it lies in a wide loop of the Lot River and is famous for its 14th-century bridge, the Pont Valentré.
“Lot (department)” enters the record as french department. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what department and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Lot (department)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, department and French provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12576. VIAF identifies the subject as 125492314. The Library of Congress control number is n80132128. Authority coordinates are 44.559, 1.576. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 1790 and 1808.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lot (department)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.