Hiking and Walking in France
In 1838, eight statues were erected around the Place de la Concorde (in the centre of Paris) that were dedicated to eight major cities of France: Bordeaux, Brest, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Rouen, and Strasbourg. Why these eight cities – and not Toulouse, for example, which was bigger than Strasbourg at the time, while Brest…
When new administrative districts were created by the French revolutionary government in 1790, the names for these départements were nearly always based on rivers and mountains. Traditional names counted for nothing, since the idea was to avoid any references to religion or the culture of the ancien regime. Not even the département of Paris was…
Close your eyes and think of – no, not of England (for a change) but of Brittany: what do you see? Let me guess: I suspect that your mental image may very well feature rugged cliffs and rocky coastlines plus, perhaps, a couple of weather-beaten seamen in a small fishing boat, brazing the winds and…
Monaco is the fastest growing country in the world. Over the past few decades, the size of its surface area has increased by approx. 23 per cent. In order to hit the same growth rate, Russia, a state similarly keen on territorial expansion, would have to annex not only the Ukraine plus the Baltic States…
Today, we will be continuing our exploration of the traboules, Lyon’s hidden passages that connect neighbouring buildings and sometimes entire apartment blocks. We will do so, however, in a different part of town: in a quarter that has more of an airy feel than the occasionally claustrophobic Vieux Lyon … … and in a different…
Over the years, the Easy Hikers have introduced you to subway systems, challenged you to follow in the tracks of the world’s most notorious serial killer, and one of our walks went up with a gradient angle of 90 degrees – inside a church tower. Occasionally, we admit, we have come dangerously close to stating…
The world is constantly changing, but some parts of it change more quickly than others. Landscapes, generally, change slowly and gradually if at all: on a return visit to the Alps, you will expect to see the same mountains as many years before and be rarely disappointed. Cities, by contrast, evolve much more quickly, and…
Nantes is one of France’s great provincial cities and stands – in the minds of the French – for the Atlantic West as Marseille stands for the South and Strasbourg for the East. Foreign visitors may be familiar with the city as the entry point to two of the country’s most famous tourist regions: Brittany,…
Holidays are full of surprises! Or at least, they should be because that, after all, is the very essence of a break: to abandon your every-day routines and their dull predictability. Not all surprises can be pleasant, of course, but the bad surprises are the price we have to pay for the travel experiences we…
If we have so far – with last week’s post and the dispatches from our previous trip to Brittany – given you the impression that this corner of north-western France is all stone, sunshine and dramatic rock formations, then today’s visit to the Ile Grande provides the perfect opportunity for setting things straight. This island…