The arena at Nîmes.

The Maison Carree (square house) was a Roman temple from the 1st Century BC.
(It's also a bus stop).

Nîmes

No better way to start off our second week than with another trip to see some Roman antiquities. This time our destination took us into the department of Gard, which is technically not part of Provence, to see the city of Nîmes. Serving as the capital for yet another Cletic tribe, the town earned its name from a nearby spring called Nemansus. The Romans liked the fact that Nîmes was located on the principal trade route between Italy and Spain, so decided to call it their own. The transition was peaceful and Nîmes flourished as a Roman city replete with villas, baths, temples, and even a coliseum. Nîmes survived the years of strife that saw other towns destroyed and prospered as a trading center. The industrial revolution turned the city into a center for the textile industry in France, where it specialized in silk and cotton fabrics. A specific durable blue cotton fabric became well-known as de Nîmes (from Nîmes), and when Levi Strauss ran across it in California in the mid-1800’s, well, it became even more famous.

It was early morning on a Sunday and not much was open, so we sat in a café next to the arena in Nîmes sipping café au lait. The interior of arena has been fully renovated and is used for bullfights (an import from Spain) in the summer months and concerts year round. It is equipped with an inflatable roof for the winter months. After the fall of the Roman Empire, people began moving into the arena to live. At its peak, over 2,000 people lived in 200 houses inside the arena.

The magnificent Pont du Gard.

A view up from the river Gard.

The end of the aqueduct with the original channel turning off to the left once it exits.

Pont du Gard

Eventually the Nemansus spring near Nîmes couldn’t supply enough water for the burgeoning city and the Romans were forced to look for another source. They decided to import water from another spring some 30 miles away and built an aqueduct across the landscape. To cross the river Gard, they constructed the magnificent Pont du Gard. The structure served as both an aqueduct, water flowed through a covered channel at the top, and a bridge. It’s amazing to think they used stone blocks weighing up to 12 tons to build it. It is truly an engineering marvel and pictures don’t do it justice.

Uzès

D had seen some nice pictures of Uzès in his hiking book, so we swung by after our visit to the Pont du Gard with the primary objective of getting something to eat. This is, of course, no small task after the prescribed hours of lunchtime in Provence. Uzès is known as the “city of towers” for its six large towers that project from the town’s medieval skyline. It will never be called the “city of restaurants”. We searched without success until we finally came across a café that was willing to give us a plate of cold cuts with stale bread. To cap off our fine meal, we visited the town biscuiterie where we invested in some homemade cookies and candies. When it comes to sweets in France, you can pretty much bank on the fact that nothing is as good as it looks. Though our brief stay was less than enjoyable, Uzès is a very picturesque town and warrants inclusion on any itinerary that brings you to the area.

One of the towers in Uzès,

The troglodyte site at Calès.

More of the caves at Calès.

The interior of one of the chambers carved into the sandstone.

Calès

Although we spent a lot of time walking around Uzès looking for a place to eat, we hadn’t gone for an official hike for several days. We headed off just down the road from Eygalières to start a hike that would take us by the site at Calès near the town of Lamanon along the Durance. There is a large outcropping of sandstone at Calès that had been home to a Neolithic troglodyte tribe who had carved homes into the soft faces of the cliffs. Similar to sites we had seen by the Anasazi in Arizona, these people used logs jutting from the stone as stairs to move from one dwelling to the other. It is reported that up to 150 families lived here at its peak.

Fontaine de Vaucluse

Following the Sorgue, a tributary of the Rhône, up toward the Vaucluse Plateau and the white-capped Mont Ventoux, one comes to the town of Fontaine de Vaucluse. Fontaine for the spring that made it famous and Vaucluse from the Latin Vallis Clause or “closed valley”, complements of the Romans. Aside from being a stop for seemingly every tourist bus, Fontaine is also known mainly for water and paper. Starting with the first mill in 1522, Fontaine used the force of the Sorgue to become a center for papermaking. Rags were pulped between grinding stones powered by water wheels, pressed, and dried to form a medieval version of paper. The last paper mill closed in 1968.

Fontaine is also rather famous for having hosted the Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) from 1337-1357. While attending mass in Avignon one day, Petrarch caught sight of a woman named Laura. Although they never met, she became the inspiration for a number of poems on Petrarch’s unrequited love and eventually lamenting her death. While there are theories on the identity of Laura, it has never been established, and Petrarch’s love poems became world renowned for their poignancy. They even prompted Giacomo Casanova to visit Fontaine in 1790 to pay homage to the poet.

A fountain in Fontaine with an old paper mill and a 15th century castle built by the Bishops of Cavaillon.

Another fountain near the town's church.

The spring at Fontaine to Vaucluse.

Another view of the origin of the Sorgue.

La Source

Tracing the Sorgue upstream for about a mile out of town, one comes to the real reason people visit Fontaine de Vaucluse – la source. At the base of a 700 ft cliff sits a pool of emerald green water from which rushes forth the Sorgue at a rate of 165 billion gallons per year, making it one of the largest springs in the world. At peak flows, the spring captures rain from the Vaucluse Plateau and snow melt from Mont Ventoux as well as other nearby mountains. In summer, the level of the spring can fall low enough to reveal the mouth of a cave at the base of a cliff. As early as 1878, divers have tried to explore the subterranean formations looking for the bottom of the spring. Even Jacques Cousteau gave it a go. An expedition in 1985 used cameras to find the bottom to be over 900 ft before moving off horizontally under the plateau.

Fort St.-Jean at the mouth of the harbor.

A view back towards the Vieux Port with forts St.-Jean and St.-Nicholas guarding the entrance.

A view from Notre-Dame de la Garde as storm clouds move in.

Notre-Dame de la Garde perched over Marseille.

The unique church has a draw bridge to keep out unwanted tourists.

The 33 ft statue of Mary and Jesus as skies begin to clear.

The Palais du Pharos.

Abbaye de St.-Victor with Notre-Dame de la Garde in the background.

The famous opera in Marseille.

Marseille

Our New Years Eve plans of going to a friend's home to celebrate had fallen through because her children were both sick. So because of our tight schedule this proved to be our only opportunity to make the one hour drive to the coast and see Marseille. We were going to celebrate at midnight there, maybe in a café or restaurant, so there was no hurry in getting to Marseille and we arrived just after noon.

The history of Marseille is one that greatly influences Provence as well as France as a whole. Around 600 BC, a group of Greeks arrived in this region and were invited to a celebration to meet King Nann, leader of the local Celtic tribe. It just so happened that his daughter was to choose her husband at this celebration, and when she laid eyes on the leader of the Greek party, you can guess what happened. What woman can resist a Greek sailor? As a wedding present, the king presented the couple with a parcel of land called Lacydon. The Greeks founded a major trading port at this site called Massalia which flourished immediately by establishing trading routes along the Mediterranean and African coasts. The city avoided the fate of many others by aligning itself with Rome, and it remained an independent republic for many years. Massalia had a great influence on the interior of Provence where inhabitants could sail their goods down the Rhône to sell at or have sent from the large port. The Greeks at Massalia introduced olives, figs, cherries, and nuts into Provence. Marseille continued to benefit from the crusades which used the port as a launching point and also the French wars with Italy and Spain when pirated vessels from both countries were brought there for looting. After the French Revolution, when an insurgence of counter-revolutionists in Paris threatened to retake the capital, 500 soldiers marched from Marseille to help quell the uprising. The song they sang while entering Paris, Roget de Lisle’s “Hymn to the Army of the Rhein”, became a rallying cry for defenders of the republic, and it was embraced as France’s national anthem, La Marseillaise. The red, white and blue French flag was also adopted from the flag of Martigues on the outskirts of Marseille. Today Marseille is France’s second largest city and the largest port on the Mediterranean. It is best known for pastis, tourists, North Africans, Olympique de Marseille (known locally as OM) and the milieu (the French mafia).

We began our visit by making the climb to the highest point of town to visit the church of Notre-Dame de la Garde. The two-toned neo-Byzantine church was built on the site of a 13th century chapel and is topped by a 33 foot gilded statue of the Madonna. The interior of the church is decorated with a nautical theme as it was a place of worship and prayer for sailors and their families in and around Marseille. It also served as Nazi headquarters during World War II. It is the best place to get a feel for the expanse of Marseille and gave us a way to assess the distance between the sites we wanted to see. Unfortunately, the original Greek settlement with its old houses and twisting streets was blown up by the Nazis. They left only three of the original buildings that appealed to them, the opera being one. A rare occurrence in Marseille, it began to rain, and weI ducked into the church’s restaurant for an unusual lunch amid a mixture of tourists and nuns.

D received a call from his friend back in Cavaillion who decided to go ahead with her New Years Eve dinner plans after all since her sister had decided to visit. J had wanted to meet some real-life French people, so we accepted the invitation although it meant cutting our trip to Marseille short. The rain had let up, so we made our way down to the Vieux Port to see some the oldest parts of town. Our stroll took us past the Abbaye de St.-Victor which, dating back to the 5th century, was one of the first Christian structures in the area and a launching point for missionaries to spread Christianity to the rest of Provence. We made our way down past the Fort St.-Nicholas, built by Louis XIV to keep and eye on the ornery Marseillaise, to the Palais du Pharos. Built by Napolean III and now used for concerts, Pharos offers an excellent view back toward the old port. Across the entrance to the port is the medieval fortress of St.-Jean and the colossal neo-Byzantine Cathédrale de la Nouvelle Major.

After some time in the Christmas market, looking at some stores, and sipping a pastis at an outside café while watching the sun set over the harbor, it was time to head back for our New Years soirée.

St.-Jean and Cathédrale de la Nouvelle Major.

The islands off of Marseille. The closest is home to the Château d'If, the prison that held the Count of Monte Cristo.

Fort St.-Nicholas with the highway burrowed underneath.

Le Réveillon

Not wanting to drink champagne on an empty stomach, we decided to grab a bite to eat before we headed to the New Years Eve party. It was almost 10pm and the only thing open was Bismilah’s Kebabs, so we each scarfed down a kebab and went home to change into some decent cloths. When we arrived at our friend’s home, we were horrified to see the dinner table set for what looked like to be a long meal (i.e., lots of different kinds of knives and forks). The festivities got underway with an assortment of appetizers including both green and black tapanade (a Provençal olive paste), courchette (zucchini) dip, caviar, and trout eggs, all washed down with the first bottle of champagne. Things moved on to an enormous platter of huîtres (raw oysters), the traditional New Years Eve dish in France. From the expression on our faces, our hosts thought we had never seen raw oysters before. Living in New England, of course, this was not the case. It was just that neither of us cared for them very much and would rather eat them cooked given the option. Our hosts shuddered at the thought of cooked oysters and encouraged us to indulge. So with the taste of trout eggs still fresh in our mouths, we did our best with the oysters. Always the competitor, J refused to be outdone by D, and we finally called it a draw after four each.

Sometime during the eating of the huîtres, we toasted the new year at the stroke of midnight. Another French tradition is that everyone calls one another immediately after midnight, a custom obviously initiated by the France Telecom. So there was a slight delay before the main course made it to the table. Remembering a previous discussion, our hostess prepared a heaping platter of cuisses de grenouille (frog legs) especially for D and J. Having already been less than enthused with the first few offerings, we mustered up all our courage, piled a bunch on our plates while looking eager. To our knowledge, it was the first time we had eaten an amphibian, and we openly admit that they are actually pretty good. Not unexpectedly, they taste like chicken but with a light flavor of fish. There’s an amazing amount of meat on those little guys, too. They were cooked in oil and garlic and served with rice as well as a sausage dish from Réunion Island plus a lot more wine. D was quite proud of his pile of frog leg bones until he glanced over at J’s plate to see a pile twice as large and her licking her fingers looking for more.

The beautiful city walls of Aigues Mortes.

One of the main gates to the city.

Tour Constance was a protestant prison.

Aigues Mortes

The alarm rang awfully early the next morning. As much as we would have liked to sleep in, J was running out of days and it was now or never to go to the Camargue. We rolled out of bed at 8 am, showered, and headed off toward the Rhône. The Camargue is the delta formed by the Rhône flowing into the Mediterranean Sea. It’s sort of a marshy wetlands area famous for rice, flamingos (in the summer), bulls, and white horses. Lower in altitude and closer to the coast, the weather looked to be nicer as well. Our first destination was Aigues Mortes, which along with the Pont du Gard, and the theatre at Orange, is on our list of top three things to see in Provence.

When Pope Innocent IV beckoned the kings of Europe in 1245 to lead a crusade to the Holy Land, King Louis IX was ready to answer the call. The problem was that he had no land on the Mediterranean coast with which to organize the fleet. At that time, the French coast was under control of the German Empire and the King of Aragon. Louis traded some land up north for a parcel of mosquito-infested swampland known as “dead waters” that had access to the sea. Louis built a beautifully laid out grid city there called Aigues Mortes (dead waters) as well as a road through the swamps connecting it to the mainland. People weren’t exactly dying to move there, so he granted special exemptions from taxes, duties, and tolls to attract some inhabitants. Eventually he found enough volunteers to lead the 7th Crusade with 100 ships and thousands of men. He returned years later and immediately started organizing his next crusade from which he was never to return. For his efforts, he was canonized as Saint Louis and is celebrated every August 25th with a feast.

Having never been attacked, the city walls surrounding Aigues Moertes are in immaculate condition. As I mentioned, the streets are laid out in a perfect grid with each ending at a gate in the city walls. The city now survives on tourism and the salt trade. Large ponds of sea water are left to evaporate, and the precipitated salt is packaged for export. No longer directly on the coast due to the changing Rhône, a canal connects it with the sea.

We spent some time walking around town, although all but one street and the main square was closed because it was New Years Day. We found a quaint little restaurant and indulged in taureau à la gardienne, a dish of rice and tender bull meat in a wine sauce with olives. After strolling around some more to work off lunch, we made our way to our second destination in the Camargue.

La Gardiane restaurant on the town square.

Statue of King Louis IX.

The Camargue is famous for its white horses.

Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

The town of Stes.-Maries-de-la-Mer looks and feels like a seaside resort in Spain. Its crawling with tourists, filled with shops and restaurants, and peppered with crêpe, gauffre (waffle), and ice cream stands (with exotic flavors like violet, lavender, and toblerone). Legend has it that Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, and Mary Jacobe landed here in the “boat of Bethany” after being set adrift from the Holy Land. For miraculously surviving the ordeal, they were canonized (hence the name of the town Saint Marys of the Sea). Along for the ride was a slave named Sarah who is now the patron saint of gypsies. Every year gypsies from all over Europe flock to the city in what is known as the Pèlerinage des Gitans to honor Sarah who is buried in the town’s church.

Goodies for sale in Stes.-Maries-de-la-Mer.

Church housing the tomb of Sarah.

A leisurely game of pétanque.

The Tallgard

J’s last day saw the onset of yet another cold mistral blowing through the area, so it was left up to her as to what she wanted to do. D was glad to find that she opted for a brief hike in the nearby Tallgard, an area near Salon-de-Provence that is known for its ancient terraces and bories. It was a cold walk, but we pulled through and returned home to pack, drink some wine, and say our goodbyes.

Bories were used to provide shelter to shepherds.

A windy overlook of the surrounding landscape.

One of the more interesting bories.