South of France

OK, I grant you, this picture could have been taken anywhere in France, or plenty of other places in the world. So you are just going to have to take my word for it, it was taken at Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, a resort on the French Riviera betwen Sanary-sur-Mer and Bandol.

Be that as it may, it’s a lovely photo with the inevitable bright colours and reflections that you look for in a picture of this type that really does give you the urge to climb in and row off into the sunset.

Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer was once a cluster of separate places - the ports of La Madrague and Les Lecques, and the village of Saint-Cyr itself.

But time moves on, as does property development and tourism, and the whole is now generally thought of as one attractive ensemble, albeit with different characteristics according to where you are in the town.

This reminds me of the the ‘merging of villages’ trend as found in the ski resorts of the Alps, where each resort rushes to be the biggest and the best, by merging a handful of villages into one great ‘tourist experience’ - hence ‘Les Trois Vallées’ includes Meribel, Courchevel, Val Thorens…

I digress. Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer is a fine town in an attractive location and with some lovely coastal walks and beaches nearby. It is also home to one of just four ’small scale models’ of the Statue of Liberty made by the original sculptor which is proudly displayed, in all its golden splendour, in the town centre.

Hot on the heels of our comments about the characteristics of the various coastlines of southern France, here is a photo of the most popular seasort resort in France - Nice.

Nice is also a great place to visit, with both easy access to the sunny Mediterranean, and plenty to amuse you in the town when you can’t bear the sea any longer…

…some of the highlights of Nice include:

- the little cottages behind the harbour - once little storage sheds they are now glamorous boutiques and restaurants

- the Promenade des Anglais, a long established walk along the seafront

- the market on Cours Saleya, just behind the Promenade des Anglais

- the cathedral and pedestrianised squares in the older part of the town

- the sophisticated Cimiez region to the north of Nice

- the impressive Matisse museum

and much more besides.

The downside, as you see from the picture, is that the seafront itself - especially in central Nice, can become just a teensy bit crowded and it might not always be easy for your children to run around as much as they might like on the beach…

This photo of Marseille harbour is very beautiful despite having little colour, and a background view that is hard to see clearly. The Marseille it portrays is not especially realistic - very few of the ships in Marseille harbour are decked with rigging - but that hardly matters.

The question is, would it make you want to go to Marseille if you saw the picture in a travel brochure (I bought the picture for use in a travel website) - and would you be disappointed when confronted with the reality?

Photo taken in Aigues-Mortes centre

In many of the towns you visit in the south of France you will find yourself in open squares lined with trees and narrow streets of medieval houses, and very pretty they are too. The distractions at ground level will keep you occupied, and it is easy to forget to spend a moment to look above you.

Read more

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’.

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?

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.