My folks Gaye and Ron have a share in an apartment in Lodeve in the Langue Doc region of France (for some years) but we weren’t sure that we’d ever get a chance to visit.
We arrived on a warm afternoon to 1 Place de la Rebublique to find a big (for 2 people) white apartment with high ceilings in a building of fantastically faded grandeur, and a small street market taking place out front.
The market morphed into an evening event with the best music we’d seen on our trip so far (Banan’n Jug), and a range of local wine producers where you could buy a glass for 5 euros which included tickets to try 3 glasses of wine and a few friendly people happy to speak English and provide insider information. What an introduction!
We were armed with plenty of touring itineraries from Ron which took us to steep gorges many hundreds of metres high with emerald green rivers winding sinuously through the bottom. And very narrow roads winding around and through monolithic limestone. This is not the French landscape of rolling hills of lavender, this is sparsely populated, rugged, arid country with little pockets of habitation in villages unchanged for centuries. It is a compelling area.
The roads also took us to numerous medieval villages seemingly intact and barely altered in hundreds of years. Cobbled narrow streets crowded with stone buildings, winding up hillsides. All built out of the materials available, and so appearing to grow organically out of the rock. Many were clearly set up for tourists, but still with the sense that they were inhabited by people just living their lives, rather than museum pieces.
The narrow roads also took us to and over bridges, like the Pont de Diable an ancient bridge built by monks or the Viaduct du Millau a new grand sleek airy bridge hundreds of metres high. It might be obvious by now but I have uncovered a latent passion for bridges. I thought my fascination extended only to ancient stone bridges until I saw the Millau Viaduct!
The limestone country is also dotted with caves and we visited Aven Armand, a HUGE cavern with a forest of enormous stalactites, where even the cheesy lighting show couldn’t detract from the other-worldliness.
Lodeve and many of the villages (like St Guilhelm-les-desert) are on one of the routes to the Santiago de Compostela so priories, abbeys and chapels abound. And the facilities for walking are so good with excellent signage for so many walking trails through the region (take note Cornwall and the Coastal Path!). We would very much love to come back to combine some walking with canoeing down the rivers. Thanks Gayesie & Ron for the chance – we’re Langue Doc converts!
