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It was as if I had stolen the experience. Holidaying by the Languedoc seaside is standard practice in summer. Millions do it. But in March? On my calendar, this is a time for pounding a keyboard, fixing leaks, worrying about cuts and whither North Africa.
I felt guilty as I chased down a fourth oyster with a second glass of white, and the mid-morning Mediterranean light merged with the lagoon to make a dazzling case for sun worship. It was all the more illicit because Languedoc wasn’t expecting me. Unlike their posh cousins over on the Côte d’Azur, the less fashionable Languedociens have no tradition of dealing with winter or spring visitors. Off season, the region’s brazen new-build resorts were hibernating behind shutters. Beaches had no more than one set of footprints in the sand.
Meanwhile, older settlements were reduced to their proper populations and original concerns: shellfish, schooling and playing cards in cafes. Walking the villages induced a mild sense of trespass. This didn’t survive actual contact, mind. March tourists are made particularly welcome because, well, there aren’t any.
The bar-owner in Mèze beamed at me as I’d rarely been beamed at before, telling me about present oyster problems. There is, apparently, a mystery affliction stopping the bivalves from developing properly. This is tough news in Mèze, a key southern French mollusc port. So I had half a dozen, while stocks lasted.
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The coast here is nothing like the Riviera. It’s unkempt, and so flat that the sea filters inland, creating vast lagoons wherever it damned well wants Out front, oyster tables still crested the Thau lagoon like skeletal landing craft. Behind, streets barely wide enough for two weighty women wriggled through the intimacy of village life. The sky had gone silver, and oyster difficulties weren’t my difficulties. I can’t worry about everything. So I finished the wine, took off my cardigan and drove.
The coast here is nothing like the Riviera. It’s unkempt, and so flat that the sea filters inland, creating vast lagoons wherever it damned well wants. Water and land get terribly confused.
Tailored vineyards and dunes cede, here and there, to resorts chucked up, frontier-style, from the 1960s on. This is, in short, the unruly fringe of the Republic, and its wild beaches were all mine.
Sprawling around an inlet and marinas, Le Cap d’Agde is the most frolicsomely famous of the Languedoc summer playgrounds, not least for being home to Europe’s biggest naturist reserve. Little temptation in March, of course.
Yet the echo of summer happiness lingered, saving the town from melancholy. A scattering of restaurants offered full, fishy lunches for £12. And there was sublime nudity on display at the Musée de l’Ephèbe, a modern gallery of underwater archeology (£4; capdagde.com). Culture is no surprise at the southern seaside. The French need to add weight to jauntiness or they feel unjustified. Here, amid other finds hauled from the sea and nearby river, was a magnificent bronze of the young, naked Alexander the Great. Beautiful, soft-featured and merciless, the sculpture alone warranted a detour to Le Cap.
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I skirted Agde town in favour of beach-roaming. Despite the new resorts, most of the Languedoc coast remains undeveloped. There’s a hypnotic hugeness to the elements. I stopped walking only when night fell and continuing might have led to mystic excess.
From here, the coast soon sprouts the rocky rises of the La Clape massif. This is unexpectedly exciting, like finding crags in Norfolk. I made for Château le Bouïs, and strongly suggest you follow suit. On La Clape’s southern edge, above Gruissan, it is a fine old wine domain with an 18th-century guesthouse, a first-class restaurant and wines about which, after tasting a dozen, I slur with authority. The rosés are good, the whites better and the reds remarkable.
Over coming hours and days, I pottered on, looping around lagoons and dormant resorts as the coast smoothed out once again. Then I was in Roussillon, France’s real Deep South — so deep that it wasn’t French at all, but Spanish, until 1659. Well, Spanish if you consider Catalonia as Spanish, a question that invariably leads to wretched conversation.
The upshot is that the people of Roussillon claim Catalan identity — a little too stridently for some tastes. “It’s Catalan this and Catalan that,” says a Parisian friend of mine who lives in the region. “If they split the bloody atom, it would have to be a Catalan bloody atom.” But I didn’t mind. On a short visit, all the Catalan stuff — from cream desserts through extreme devotion to Perpignan rugby club — simply added extra sauce. Anyway, I too can talk about rugby until normal brains wither.
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I zipped past Perpignan to Elne, a curvy old village topped by a cathedral and startling cloisters. By now, the coast was finally running out of flatness. It rose, sharp and magnificent, to bump into the dying sighs of the Pyrenees, creating creeks and headlands as it went. Vineyards grew all but vertical, forts capped summits and the road curved down into Collioure.
With its macho backdrop, this is the only spot on the Languedoc-Roussillon littoral with the self-conscious aura of the prettier places on the Côte d’Azur. In other words, artists’ studios outnumber grocery shops. The bay and quays are essential ingredients, as is the enormous Royal Château, but the clincher is the lingering lustre of Matisse and Derain. The two showed up early last century, inspired to fauvism by what they saw. Reproductions of their works dot the small town. I tracked down all 19 and wasn’t impressed (too daubishly approximate for my sitting room, although I’d take a couple for the bank vault).
I was much happier snooping around the chateau, put up by the kings of Mallorca long before Roussillon was hived off to France. Or the quayside Notre Dame des Anges church, with its pink-domed belfry and outrageously kitsch altarpieces. Then I strolled the tiny streets, marvelling at attempts to shift the local speciality. “Retail anchovies” is about as courageous as a gift shop gets.
Round a couple of headlands, the glorious cove of Paulilles had, until 1984, been colonised by a dynamite factory. The unlikely story of workers, paternalistic bosses and explosions in a beauty spot is well told at the on-site centre.
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I ended up in Banyuls-sur-Mer, which has its own fortified wine, its own sculptor (Aristide Maillol, expert in plumptious but depressive nudes) and a storybook bay trimmed with a sufficiency of bars, where I took several aperitifs. It was warm enough to sit outside. Reflected light punctuated the water. The pastis did its job, and my neighbours engaged me in conversation about the Six Nations. As stolen experiences go, I’ve had worse.
Getting there: on the way out, fly to Béziers with Flybe (0871 700 2000, flybe.com), from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Southampton, Belfast or Dublin; or Ryanair (0871 246 0000, ryanair.com), from Bristol or Luton. Or fly to Montpellier with Ryanair, from Leeds-Bradford or Birmingham (from April 13); or EasyJet (easyjet.com), from Gatwick or Luton (from March 29). Fly home from Perpignan with Flybe, to seven UK airports; BMI Baby (bmibaby.com), to Manchester (from April 15); or Ryanair, to Stansted (from March 27). Three days’ car hire starts at £115 with Rhino (0845 508 9845, rhinocarhire.com). Or try kayak.co.uk.
Where to stay: don’t miss the Château le Bouïs, in Gruissan (00 33-4 68 75 25 25, chateaulebouis.fr; doubles from £122, B&B). In Banyuls, the Hôtel des Elmes is a friendly three-star — good restaurant, too (04 68 88 03 12, hotel-des-elmes.com; doubles from £41, room-only).