Most of the stories of great castles in France hinge on the actions of knights and noble families. I just visited a place, though, where the key moment depended on the actions of … the Electric Company? That’s the great irony in the history of the Chateau de Val: It was only a hair’s breadth away from disappearing forever at the bottom of a lake – and frankly it might not have been seriously missed. But the waters stopped just short of the castle’s walls, and gave it a romantic setting that turned this minor château in the Auvergne into a serious attraction for tourists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfe5HwSx4qw
Month: November 2017
Check out these 100-year-old Postcards from the Deep Heart of France
French people have plenty of ways to get rid of their old junk. Almost every little village organizes an annual vide grenier (“empty the attic”) sale, every town of any size has at least one brocante (second-hand) store, and flea markets (marchés aux puces) pop up somewhere every week of the year. And I, for one, am a happy consumer of what they have to sell. One of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon is combing through one of these sales, looking for an unusual wine carafe or an old print that could be salvaged from a broken frame. But one of my favorite “finds” is a box of old postcards. For me, these images are a window into […]
La Garde Guérin is officially one of France’s “Most Beautiful Villages”
It’s no secret that I think some of the places on France’s official list of “Most Beautiful Villages” are not necessarily “most beautiful”. In the case of La Garde Guérin, though… I knew right away that it was the real thing. The combination of a rich medieval history and a spectacular natural setting in the Gorges of Chassezac make this a great day trip from Le Puy en Velay. “La Garde” means “fortress” or fortified tower, and Guérin is an old family name in parts of France. Why did they need a fortress here in such an isolated corner of the country? Because this was a crossroads on an ancient path, once used for the annual process of “transhumance” (moving […]
There’s a Huge Surprise Behind this Medieval Façade in Brantôme
Our coverage of the ‘deep heart of France’ has expanded to include parts of the region known (since the consolidation of 2016) as Nouvelle Aquitaine. This recent agglomeration is the largest of the new administrative regions of France, so we’ll confine our attention just to the eastern parts – those that are still called the Limousin and the Dordogne by old-timers like me! Even as the real city of Venice looks for ways to reduce the throngs of visitors who come every year, tourist boards everywhere else seem anxious to declare their locales to be “the Venice of” wherever they happen to be. In addition to the beach in California, for example, Aveiro’s canals make it “the Venice of Portugal,” […]
