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.
