Exotic France

The donjon of Crest Castle in the Drôme Valley is the highest medieval keep in France. The tower can be scaled by stairs while abseiling is at times allowed from the top.
The medieval keep of the castle in Crest is at 52 m the highest surviving donjon in France. The castle tower can be scaled via staircases for great views of Crest and the Drôme River and on summer weekends it is possible to abseil from the top. As only the keep survived from the original huge fortress, the building is referred to as La Tour de Crest (tower) rather than Château de Crest (castle). Crest is in the Drôme Valley and a great day-trip from Grenoble, Valence, Chambéry, and French Alpine ski resorts. Read the remainder of this entry »

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While Saint-Paul-de-Vence is a pretty hill town perched above the Côte d’Azur, it is filled with daytrippers. Its lesser-known neighbour, Vence, is a real town where you can happily spend a week dipping into the superb collection of patisseries and restaurants and the exquisite Matisse chapel, the artist’s self-proclaimed greatest work. The stained-glass windows in this perfect white, modernist chapel on the hill opposite Vence’s Roman walls flood the interior with coloured light, and wall-height line drawings cover the white ceramic tiles.
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The tiny spa village of Eugénie-les- Bains is seriously remote. Bordeaux is two hours’ drive north; Biarritz is 100 miles to the west. Yet this place is on the radar of most food lovers thanks to French super-chef Michel Guérard. His three-Michelin-starred restaurant gets booked up weeks ahead in summer, and menus start at €135. But just a few minutes’ walk away is La Ferme aux Grives, a sister restaurant where Guérard trials and refines his dishes before they appear on the menu of his main restaurant.
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I used to think that the Côte d’Azur was one long private beach where you had to wrestle with naked Germans for the right to lay your towel out on three square inches of pebbles. The sea, I imagined, was warm fish soup topped with a layer of sun oil. The only places to eat were snooty restaurants, where you couldn’t get served anyway, and the pervading smells were Ferrari fumes and fake lavender essence. Of course I was absolutely right; in July and August, some of it is exactly like that. Read the remainder of this entry »

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The Loire is France’s longest river, and one of its most untamed. But it’s not its landscape that draws most tourists to the lower Loire, but the fine chateaux and palaces along its banks.
Castle building on the Loire started in the Middle Ages with keeps like that at Blois, but it was in the Renaissance that the mania for fine chateaux really began. French kings sponsored huge building programmes at Amboise and Chambord, while rich nobles built palaces like Azay-le-Rideaux, Chaumont and Chenonceaux.
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