Time to finish off last year's trip around Provence. On our last full day we decided to revisit Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for the third time. It's beside the sea in the Camargue wetlands and is somewhere that is famous for its gypsy pilgrimage held in May each year.
Many Romany and traveller people from around Europe are drawn to this festival as Sarah is the patron saint of all Romany people and her statue resides in the church in the town.
The celebrations include a big procession through the town, taking the statue of Saint Sarah down to the seashore, renacting her arrival in France. Another procession carries statues of the two saints both called Marie down to the sea, the saints after whom the town is named. There are a number of legends around how Sarah and the Maries arrived in France - they may have arrived together from Palestine and Sarah was the servant of the two Maries. Or Sarah could have already been settled in Provence and was the first person to welcome the two exiled Maries from the Holy Lands. Who knows?
It would be fun to see this but also would be difficult with a motorhome to find campsites nearby and parking anywhere near the town, so I think we will have to give it a miss!
Below are Camargue horses and one of their 'cowboys', or gardians as they are called, the guy in the hat.
The town was still bustling in September but it is a lovely place so well worth a visit. There is a marina and plenty of touristy shops and restaurants.
The town also has a number of original dwellings called 'cabanes', which were the houses where the gardiens lived, and also fishermen, shepherds and others who worked in these parts. The buildings all have a cross at the top which helps protect them from lightning and to help anchor the building (with a rope attached) in case of high winds. They are thatched and originally were made of materials available in the area, mostly reeds and clay. To protect them from the strong north wind (the Mistral) they were shaped with a rounded end facing north, and a normal rectangular shape on the sea facing south end, like below. Here we were walking along the seafront.
Looks like a dog kennel built like a cabane in front, with the ubiquitous flamingo, of which there are many in the Camargue, real or otherwise!
All the cabanes are whitewashed and many have blue shutters.
As we turned around and walked up the street behind the cabanes we could see the rounded end of one of them (many of the houses have high hedges and are not so easy to see).
Back in the town there are many alleyways full of boutiques. I adored this driftwood horse statue!
The church here, Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer, is very interesting too - it's an unusual shape and very tall, but it is hard to get a photo as you can't get far enough away from it and there are buildings in the way most of the time.
And a zoom in on the ubiquitous flamingos for sale! 😀
This photo was taken the next day, on our way home. This is at Etang de Thau in the Occitanie region. Behind are little jetties for the boats going to the oyster beds which you can just about make out in the distance in the water.
And that's it, the end of our Provencal trip last year! Next up, I'll make a start on our recent holiday in Spain.
We're back! We had a brilliant time in Spain which I will tell you about in due course - bearing in mind I still have a final post from the previous trip to share - but in the meantime, an update on what’s happening here.
We’ve both been busy since coming home two weeks ago - me facing a mountain of laundry and Keith, amongst other things, mowing as our housesitter didn't get around to it. I must admit I secretly rather liked our wildflower meadow! We do mow around the orchids anyway, but the pink Pyramidal Orchids (Anacamptis pyramidalis) looked lovely in amongst the grasses. There are more and more of them every year. The photos just don't do them justice.
He’s been getting the pool ready too and it is nearly up to the temperature that I like (hot) so hopefully I will get my first dip this week.
What I didn't get a photo of was a white crab spider of which I noticed three, each one on an orchid flower, waiting for insects to land, such as this Five-spot Burnet moth (Zygaena species) which was enjoying the nectar. I can't give an exact Latin name as it could be the Narrow-bordered Five-spot Burnet for all I know.
Out on the verge outside the garden this Long-lipped or Ploughshare Tongue Orchid (Serapias vomeracea) has turned from one flower to three with another one nearby!
The Nectar Bar looks good every year at this time, which is its peak time.
Valerian at the front, then Nepeta 'Six Hills Giant' followed by Salvia 'Hot Lips'.
From the other end, with a Sedum, then more Nepeta (Cat Mint), Verbena bonariensis and Perovskia, with the large Salvia "Hot Lips' and Valerian beyond. This bed is really buzzing with loads of bumble bees of all different sizes, bee flies, Hummingbird Hawkmoths and butterflies too. There are tiny Skippers about and at least one is a Lulworth Skipper, which pleases me no end!
Remember the front bed after it had all been cut back a few months ago? Of course weeds have germinated....
.... but not just weeds. This is the Bay tree, with a Holly front centre! Not only that, but lots of the plants are coming back to life - even the Yew has shoots coming up, there's a complete Hydrangea plant up and the Hibiscus are shooting. It's so sad as they will all be dug up in about a month's time. (This photo is about 10 days old and the Bay is about a foot taller now!).
A new insect for the garden - a Stick Insect! K found a drowned one in the pool some years back but we've never seen a live one in France before. We saw a huge one in Australia years ago but in your own garden it's rather more exciting! I'm not sure which species it is as I don't have close enough photos - yes there are several different species in southern France - who would have known? 😀
A cropped version - click on the photo to see it larger and sharper.
Before we went away the Black Redstarts built another nest in our covered terrace in the same place as before. They made it in three or four days - quite incredible! Whilst away, our housesiter told us there was activity around the nest and sure enough, when we returned mum and dad birds were back and forwards feeding babies. After a little while we could see beaks peeking over the edge and eventually, with a lot of encouraging noise going on by the parents, we could see two fluffy babes standing on the edge of the nest. We have to move out of the way when they wanted to feed the young although I found if I stood with my back to the nest then the parents would go there.
The first young fledged (although we didn't see, obviously) and the next day the last two or three went. We could hear the parents making a lot of noise over the next couple of days, and one evening K said the father had flown into the shed and he hoped they were not checking it out to make their next nest there. Turned out, as daddy bird was making a lot of warning noises the next morning around the shed area, then coming to the pool fence and chirping at us, there was a fledgling which had spent the night in the shed! Daddy bird was telling us this (I did wonder, so asked K to open the shed). Babe promptly got fed well by both parents then later was gone, thankfully!
Finally I just wanted to show you the difference between the 'field' across the road when we came to view the house in summer 2019, and now. Back then it was pretty much just grassland.
But now the hillside is covered in predominantly Broom, with Hawthorns, Viburnum Tinus and some other shrubs all colonising the once grassland. I don't know how it was kept as just grass before unless it was grazed by animals or somehow the grass was cut. Now the grass that is there is so long because there is a thick thatch underneath meaning you sink in a long way - it's really hard to walk in there and there are lots of low growing brambles as well. Shame as I had envisaged myself in that meadow stalking butterflies - though thankfully I don't see many butterflies there which is good (for me!).
After leaving La Faviere we started the slow journey west in the direction of home. We hoped to visit Cassis which is just east of Marseille, which we had tried to visit a previous time but couldn't find a place to park. It had looked such a lovely town that we thought we would try to get into the campsite 20 mins walk from the port, as that seemed to be the only way we could get a chance to see the place!
On the way we took a scenic road between La Ciotat and Cassis which goes along the clifftops and has the most amazing views, with plenty of places to pull off to take photos.
This natural 'bridge' wasn't as close as it looks in the photo and wasn't really accessible, otherwise we would have taken a closer look!
The kind of views we had. It was a bit of a shame that this scenic road wasn't very long, only about 30 minutes of driving time, though it took us longer due to several stops.
This is a hemi parasitic plant called Odontites luteus. It is a part of the Broomrape family of parasitic plants.
I was stumped by this plant at first because the seed pods looked like they had been carved from wood. They were very unusual. It turns out it is none other than the Sage-leaved Rockrose (Cistus salviifolius), only I've never seen it in the autumn before, only in the spring when it is flowering! Aren't those seed pods amazing?!
Some tourists took some photos of us and vice versa. Only in the first photo I had my eyes shut, and then I was just leaning over to Keith so he could put his arm around me when she took the next photo, so I look a bit strange! 😀
Looking straight down over the cliff!
A view of Cassis.
Cassis again, zoomed in.
It turned out this was to be the best view we would get of Cassis as the campsite was full, of course. They don't allow booking either which is really annoying. I don't think we are destined to ever get here!
Here's a map showing our route from La Faviere to here, and then on to our next, and last, stop of our trip - the Camargue.
