Three days of villages

We've spent the last  three days discovering and exploring some of the many villages around the area. They're all exquisite and after a while they start to blur together. Today I've taken time to look through the hundreds of photos I've taken and select a few that will give an idea of what we found.

We'll start with Bellegarde, the village we're staying in. It's really agricultural here with big farm vehicles driving down the narrow roads and farmers out plowing. But it has a church and a school and even the Mairie (Mayor's office).

And this is the countryside around us. It's just coming to life now. The yellow flowers in the front were a brilliant carpet in some fields but are now fading. This is rapeseed and I believe it is used to make what we call Canola oil.

Everywhere we drive we see beautifully cultivated land like this with large and small villages here and there. We're most interested in the beautiful old ones. Like Cordes sur Ciel, which sits up on a hill above the rolling fields.








It's a medieval village that was basically abandoned for decades until it was discovered by hippie artisans in the 1960s. Since then it's become known for its leatherwork and other crafts. We walked up and up from where we left the car, passing stone houses like this. We wanted to move right in.

Here's the main square with chestnut trees and and green painted shutters and a place for people to gather and a stunning view over the fields below.

On Wednesday we awoke to a misty day and drove South to visit Lautrec, a village where Toulouse Lautrec's family lived for generations. Unlike Cordes, Lautrec was very sleepy, with no restaurants or coffee shops open. It felt somewhat gloomy, perhaps because of the grey weather. Many of the doors had little bunches of grass tied to the handles--maybe some kind of blessing or good-luck charm?

Neither the cat nor the tortoise seemed to mind the cloudy day though.

Lautrec has one of the only working windmills left in France, although the sails on the paddles were furled so nothing was happening.  From the this hill we could look down on the town and the plain below it. We ducked under this arch on the way back down the hill.

Yesterday we stopped in four (!) more villages. The first was St. Jeury for the Thursday morning market. The second was Gaillac, a centre for the very good local wines that are made here. Below is the St. Jeury market--about a half a mile of stalls strung along a plaza in the centre of town.

As well as the usual assortment of gorgeous vegetables, there were stalls selling everything from shoes to underwear to pots and pans, kbroom and baskets. This was sold oil cloth by the meter.

 

The next two villages were also high up on hills. Castelnaud-de-Montmiral is a Bastide village with both stone and half-timbered buildings. (I'll write more about these in another post).

After exploring it we stopped for a drink in a little cafe overlooking the farms below and the proprietor told us about another village, one of the "plus beaux villages de France" that was only about a 15 minute drive away. Of course we had to go, even though it was getting late and we were kind of tired of driving.  So off we headed to Puycelsi, perhaps the most darling hilltop village we've ever seen.





Puycelsi sits atop a very high cliff. It's been completely restored and has an almost fairy-tale out-of-time feeling. Yet it was obvious that contemporary people are living here.  Here's a bit of what we saw.

On the left is the gentle side of the hill where we parked the car to the right is a chapel that was built in the 1600s to commemorate the ending of the plague.  The other photo is the adorable cafe with an arbour to shade diners from the sun.

All the buildings are of stone with the typical red tile roofs. Roses and wisteria and irises are growing everywhere. An aside--the wisteria is on the wane, but it's replaced by lilacs, both white and mauve that scent everything

I'll leave you with these last three photos of the village. Of course it took twice as long as he said it would to get Puycelsi. If you are exhausted from reading and looking at this post, just think how tired we were last night when we finally got home.  But we're so happy we made the effort to see this little piece of heaven.