It seems odd that a town would name itself after an onion, but that appears to be what Lezignan la Cebe has done. “Cebe” comes from the Occitan word for “onion”, and about 500 years ago the local people began referring to their town by that name. Here is the google-translate version of the Lezignan […]

[Read more →]

I have been to Death Valley and to Badwater Basin there. I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s left of Deadwood or the Alaskan city named Deadhorse. Those are pretty foreboding names — which do nothing but further intrigue tourists. Aigues Mortes is a French entry in the “morbid town” competition. It translates from the Occitan as […]

[Read more →]

A advantage of living in the south of France is that you are never far from the north of Spain. From the Beziers area, one can reach the border in about 90 minutes. Another half hour or so puts you near Girona as well as the Costa Brava vacation sites. Which is a nice place […]

[Read more →]

  France appears to be a world-leader in caves. It has world-famous caves (Lascaux, and the Paleolithic paintings), it has deep caves, it has gigantic caves, it has long caves. It has lists of caves that do not appear to be remotely complete. It has so many caves that some of them close to population […]

[Read more →]

After the hike of two days ago brought us to the edge of a pair of fairly large bodies of … something liquid-y … we have an explanation on what we were looking at. It comes from a 30-year resident of the town where we are staying, and one of the community’s most prominent members? […]

[Read more →]

The little towns in this part of southern France are usually separated by a valley and a ridge. The former is generally given over to agriculture. Vines, mostly, with a few olive groves and the occasional wheat field mixed in. Then comes the ridge, which inevitably is crowned by trees and bushes. You climb up […]

[Read more →]

OK, maybe it wasn’t witting. Not much that sheep do is witting, as I understand it. Not the smartest mammals around, and not even the cleverest herd animal, apparently. They need to be led. But they played a key role in getting us over the trackless plateau atop a ridge, west of where we are […]

[Read more →]

Consider this another example of the widely held notion that the French will eat anything. In the seaside city of Sete, near to where we are staying, the town put on a two-day event called L’oursinade — which roughly translates as the Sea Urchin Festival. The notion that a person would want to eat the […]

[Read more →]

Ghost towns fascinate us. The notion of a place, sinking into decrepitude but still clearly recognizable as a town or city, produces a sort of magnetic force upon tourists and others with a little extra time on their schedule. Which explains as well as anything how it was we happened to go out of our […]

[Read more →]

This part of the Languedoc is green, rolling and quiet. A big city is one with 5,000 people. Most have 2,000 or fewer. In many of the small towns scattered among the vineyards a visitor cannot expect to find a restaurant or even a bakery. But every town with even a dozen buildings will have […]

[Read more →]