Hiking and Walking in France
The Canal du Midi is one of the greatest feats of civil engineering in the history of the world. Its construction stretched the 17th century’s technological knowledge and ingenuity to its very limits, much as the Channel Tunnel project would 300 years later. For nearly 2000 years, people had been dreaming of a navigable waterway…
Granted: not many famous writers have come from the Riviera. Writers, however, have always loved to travel to the southern coast of France, sometimes only to relax and to have fun, but sometimes also to work and – eventually – to write about it, in one form or the other. The list of visiting great…
Several years ago, when we had already established our base on the Riviera but not yet turned it into a proper home, we decided one day to walk from Eze-sur-mer all the way up to Eze village. This turned out to be a fairly tough hike, particularly for that half of the easy hiking team…
Granted: nobody would mistake the Alpes Maritimes for the Himalaya. After all, the mountains which line the coast of the French and Italian Riviera are easily measured in the hundreds of metres rather than the thousands. They can, however, look intimidatingly high when seen from the ground up. When you stand by the sea –…
Remember the Festival des Jardins on the French Riviera and our posts about the ten contestants from Grasse to Menton? If you do, you may also remember our promise to tell you who won as soon as the standings were published. Well, today’s the day. French Riviera Garden Festival 2017 Winners! First of all, our…
No long-winded openings today: there is no time to lose. Six more contestants in the French Riviera’s inaugural Festival des Jardins are waiting for our visit! (The first four are here!) First, we are going to Antibes, or – to be more precise – to Antibes’s beach resort suburb of Juan-les-Pins, where – at Pinède Plage,…
Gardens are a part of the Riviera scenery like yachts, open-top sports cars and deposed government officials from corrupt cleptocracies. Unlike the mountains and the sea, they have not always been there but have become so much part of the cultural landscape that nobody remembers or can even imagine a time when they were not….
When we drew your attention to some of the most beautiful “Gardens of the Riviera” a few weeks ago, we failed to mention any garden to the west of Grasse. Not because there were no gardens in this part of the world but only for the reason that we had never visited any. Now, however,…
Porquerolles – the largest of the three Iles d’Hyères just off the coast in southern France – is what the Mediterranean would look like if it had never been touched by modern civilization. It says a lot, I think, that this highlights not so much what Porquerolles has been missing out on but much rather…
Today, we are off to Menton, the easternmost resort on the French Riviera, for a walk that takes in all the best things about this blessed little spot: its history, its scenic location and its vicinity to la bella Italia. The walk allows you to experience Menton’s picturesque historic town centre, provides you with splendid views…