South of France

This impressive series of buildings was built in the 14th century, after Rome became too violent for Pope Clement V and he, along with successive popes, set up home in Avignon instead. The Pope’s palace in Avignon continued to be home to the popes until 1377, and following a later split in the Catholic church it then became home to a faction known as the ‘antipopes’.

May 2008, and a few days of exceptionally heavy rain led to a great deal of flooding and damage in the Dordogne and surrounding areas. The picture shows the road, with the tops of fence posts just visible.

Luckily the poor weather tends to pass quickly, but this type of flooding can occur at any time of the year (this years was the worst for 20 years) disrupting traffic and isolating towns and villages for a day or two.

OK you’ve decided on a location in France for your trip, now you need to choose somewhere where you can stay. We’ll leave the possibility of a holiday-rental for another day and just look at hotels.

As with hotels everywhere, the price varies considerably according to the location, the season, and the quality of the hotel. It is usually possible to find a hotel room for less than 50 euros a night, but it might be a bit rough around the edges. Pay 100 euros per night and it should be quite nice, pay more than that and the standard should continue improving.

How to choose your hotel in the south of France?

Of course, there are a lot of agencies that list hotels, and travel agents can also find you somewhere suitable to stay, but you will often get a better deal if you can do your own researches on the internet. Hotel listing sites never include all possible hotels (neither do travel agents) so a bit of ingenuity is needed.

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Imagine you have a week in the south of France and want to see everything. Not easy - you could spend three months travelling across the region and there would still be lots of things you missed. However, we will imagine you are landing at Bordeaux airport and plan to travel from west to east in a suitably fast car and go home with great memories of your visit. Where to start?

Day 1 Saint Emilion

Head east from Bordeaux towards Bergerac and after about one hour you will reach St Emilion. Best known for producing some of the greatest French wines, Saint Emilion is also a very lovely town and now a UNESCO listed world heritage site.

Park at the bottom of the town and head up the narrow streets until you reach the main square, with a church on one edge carved into the rock. Continue upwards through the streets of attractive stone buildings, in the style traditional for the region and you reach a broad pathway with great views back across the town and surrounding vineyards.

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Conques is a very attractive village in the Aveyron department, with a renowned pilgrimage abbey and a main street lined with beautiful houses, all in a picture postcard setting in a wooded valley. So why does this photo of Conques show none of that?

This house caught my eye because of the balustrades that form part of the external wall of this house - they seem to be actually built into the wall, rather than a vestige left over from when an adjacent house fell down. Now how does a house come to have external balustrades I wonder?

We arrived in Puy l’Eveque around 10am in the morning. Good sign - it was a lovely warm spring day. Bad sign - couldn’t find anywhere to park, perhaps because it was market day. It took a few minutes to find that there is plenty of parking at the west edge of the town, very little if you approach from the east.

It also turned out that the town looks very attractive if you approach from the east (Cahors side) but less so from the west (Fumel side). Don’t be discouraged whichever side you are coming from! As it turned out Puy l’Eveque is small and it doesn’t really matter where you park.

There was a sign marked ‘panorama’ so we took a look out across the roof tops of the town, which was very pretty. Just below the panorama was a garden that looked long abandoned but was in a beautiful position - I wonder why they didn’t make more of it. Read more

Lovely view of one of the lesser known cathar castles of Languedoc - actually three castles strung out along the top of a rocky ridge, at Chateau Lastours.

Vacations in the south of France mean different things to different people.

Coastal vacations in the south of France

Some people think first of the coast of France when planning their visit. And for good reason - the coast and beaches in the south of France offer a wide range of possibilities!

For some the perfect visit will include a week surfing in the fine waves of the Atlantic Coast around Biarritz, the capital of surfing in Europe. Others will prefer the Mediterranean coast - the French Riviera offers some of the finest scenery to be found, and more or less guaranteed sunshine during the summer months. This section of the coast can be very crowded in high season, and you need to pay to use many of the beaches.

Then there is the Languedoc coast south of Perpignan - much less crowded than the Cote d’Azur further east, the beaches are family friendly, sandy, and also less crowded. The region is also popular with those seeking naturist beaches. Read more

The current fascination that people have with the cathar castles is perhaps because of the simple pure life that the cathars pursued; or perhaps because of the terrible persecution the cathars suffered at the hands of the Albigensian Inquisition.

Equally, whispered suggestions that there might be a connection between the cathars, their castles, and the hiding place of the Holy Grail have done little to dispel interest. The book ‘The Da Vinci code’ has doubtless played a role.

Of course, now in the 21st century, we are all on the side of the peace-loving cathars and not the side of the terrible crusaders. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far, and at the time there was a case for the attack son their way of life and principles, but it is easy to sympathise with the plight of the cathars as they tried simply to live moral, good lives - but without the Catholic church to guide them, a rejection that was ultimately to be their downfall. Read more

Less well known than the Dordogne region to the north, the Lot et Garonne region contains some hidden treasures in the form of the medieval bastide towns that dot the region.

Head south from Lalinde or south-east from Bergerac and you will enter the quiet countryside that typifies the region. Agriculture and small scale farming are the main business here with fruit, sunflowers and maize being among the main crops grown. The fruit includes many plum orchards that produce the fruit for the very popular (and very tasty) ‘pruneaux d’Agen’ - the prunes are only half dried, so much more most than the prunes you might be familiar with.

The bastide towns were founded in the 13th century, half by the English and half by the French, partly for administrative reasons and partly for defensive reasons. Some of them have disappeared into the history books, and others have been swallowed by larger more modern towns, but there remain plenty of these small medieval towns for you to discover in this part of France. Read more