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.
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.
It took us a day and a half to drive to the coast to our usual campsite at La Faviere, near Le Lavandou.
Somewhere along the way, still in the mountains, we took these photos.
We also passed the Lac de Serre Poncon again, this time from the south side where we were high up and the views were outstanding.
When we arrived at the campsite, it was full! That's never happened before, as there must be about 500 pitches there. So we were told to go and find another campsite for the night, but we could go back to our campsite of choice for the following couple of nights and we could arrive just before lunchtime, which gave us another half day there. At this campsite we stay put and don't use the Moho and give K a break from driving for a few days. We can take a bus from here or we walk. This time though, we were right the other end of the site from the sea, a good ten minutes walk uphill.
It was all good exercise for us as the restaurant was also ten mins walk and we sat out on the covered terrace, which wasn't particularly warm as you can see. It even rained!
The following day was cloudy but it was market day at nearby Le Lavandou, which is a huge and very good market (another handbag added to the collection. Woven paper or straw handbags are all the rage, don't you know 😉). The campsite has a little train, so we decided to take it to the beach in order to walk into Le Lavandou to the market. However it is actually much quicker to walk! The train went up and down the alleyways and took forever to get to the stop near the beach. This is the best photo of the bunch we took because the train was rattling and jolting along. It was fun and interesting to see all around the vast campsite.
Mont Dauphin is yet another Vauban fort, of which there are many around the borders of France, including in the mountains, both Pyrenees and the Alps. This fort was completed in 1700 to protect the Alpine frontier, however after the Treaty of Utrecht 13 years later the borders moved and thus this fort, being no longer near the border, never became the size of garrison town that Vauban had envisaged.
After the first world war the military left the fort and many civilians left too, with the population dropping down to only 30 during the 1970s-1980s. Nowadays, after many artists and craftspeople moved in to work for tourists, the population is 170.
This image gives you an idea of the shape of the fortifications. All the Vauban forts which we've seen have similar shapes. It's very hard to show this from ground level pictures. I've mentioned Vauban before but for anyone who doesn't know, he was a French military engineer who served under Louis XIV, and was considered the greatest military engineer of his time. He also worked on many civilian infrastructure projects, such as ports, canals and roads.
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We entered by the road that you see at the bottom of the photo above and went over a couple of moats/ditches to get into the village part of the fortress.
The views are magnificent here.
Keith in front of one of the Corps de Garde (guardhouses) - this was on our way out so is the same guard house as the one I'm standing in front of above.
The Lunette d'Arcon - with a vaulted artillery proof chamber, which was probably to defend the main entrance to the fort. You can see it (V shaped) bottom left in the aerial photo. (I've got my photo order mixed up - this was before the bridges and guard houses, but I'm not going to change it all now!).
Southern Globethistle (Echinops ritro), a plant that seems to thrive in dry soil at this time of the year. It is very prickly though!
If you look closely at the largest image, you can see a Honey Bee at the top of the largest flower, a Violet Carpenter Bee under the flower, and a wasp of some sort on the right hand flower.
Going over the second bridge to enter the village.
Inside the village area.
There are only a few streets and I've found that the villages within Vauban's forts tend to be a bit austere.
Same street, looking back in the other direction.
We walked past the village and into an area of trees, then into an open area within the fortifications with amazing views. Being perched up on a rock like this adds to the defensive nature of forts like this - there is only one entrance on the flat side.
I think we are looking in the direction of the Ecrins mountain range which is further down that valley where the straight road which crosses the Guil river goes. I think our campsite was up there too - it's hard to tell directions sometimes!
We didn't visit Guillestre town itself and after this we headed south to the coast!👍
St Veran sits at an altitude of 2,042m which is the highest year round inhabited village in France, and third highest in western Europe. It's a village full of alpine style houses dating from the C17th and C18th. Once these mountain villages relied on agriculture to survive whereas now summer tourism and winter sports are also ways to make a living.
The diagram shows how the majority of houses were built. They had a stone ground floor, then wooden floors above made from whole tree trunks. A smaller stone building was attached to the main building called a 'caset'. In this were a kitchen and store rooms. The families lived in the main, largest room with the animals for warmth and the upper wooden floors called 'fustes', which allowed air to circulate, were where they dried and stored fodder for their animals for the long winter. The houses were built mainly of larch and had large larch shingles or flat stone shingles for their roofs. They face south west to take advantage of the sun.
A Rowan tree below showing its lovely orange berries.
The village is long and built mainly around one street and was historically divided into 5 hamlets. This was to do with fighting fires in the wooden buildings and hence where the water fountains were located.
There are five of these fountains/troughs in the village and the water comes from mountain springs. The round bit was for the animals to drink from and the lower rectangular part for washing clothes.
There was a large photo showing the village at the beginning of the C20th, but the buildings haven't changed a lot on the outside, although they have of course been adapted for C20th and C21st century living. That's an Crag Martin flying in the picture.
The scenery around was amazing. We could feel the cool air up here and by the state of the geraniums in planters there had been a recent frost. We had lunch sitting out on the terrace above the village here and it was really a stunning place to sit and eat. The food was extremely filling too, I had a beef stew with gnocchi which was an odd mix and I could only get through about half of it!
Here we can see a number of different roofing styles, and another fountain.
A building that is different from the rest!
We then came down from the village to the valley below and had a walk along beside the stream.
Autumn Crocus (Colchicum autumnale). I've seen them growing in the mountain areas at this time of year both in the Pyrenees and the Southern Alps, but they are widespread throughout much of Europe. There were hundreds of them in the grassy area above.
L'Aigue-Blanche stream, looking in the direction of Italy which was close by.
Looking back in the other direction.
The map shows our journey from Guillestre to St Veran.
