Céret town council has recently appointed a private firm to run parking patrols, and locals who live and work in town and rarely move their cars were unpleasantly surprised to find that they’d disappeared. Their first reaction was to report them stolen to the police, only afterwards realising that they’d been towed as they’d been parked in the same spot for over a week.
With the house finally finished we turned our attention to what we were actually going to do with it. We had been through many ideas, from running a bunk house for walkers, to high-end yoga holidays. We decided on renting the whole house to holidaymakers and I put an advert online.
Saint Laurent de Cerdans is well worth a visit any time for its church with tall steeple, its Retirada museum (not as harrowing as the main museum in La Jonquera, but informative and well presented) and its many local walks in the footsteps of escapees from the Spanish Civil War. However the village is best known for its production of the beautiful striped fabric, the “Toiles du Soleil” and its long tradition of hand crafted ‘espadrilles
The new Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi-Pyrénées region has come second in France in the Pavillon Bleu awards for the cleanliness of its lakes and beaches, just behind Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur . Fifty two beaches have been awarded the increasingly…
Céret town council has recently appointed a private firm to run parking patrols, and locals who live and work in town and rarely move their cars were unpleasantly surprised to find that they’d disappeared. Their first reaction was to report them stolen to the police, only afterwards realising that they’d been towed as they’d been parked in the same spot for over a week.
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve I decided to take a break from the kitchen and the tempting calories within, and went for a stroll up our road. Between our house and that of our shepherdess neighbour, I spied a small white van parked haphazardly at the side of the narrow road. Our normally jolly, moustachioed neighbour appeared to be slumped over the wheel.
If you fancy trying some wine that has been submerged 5m below the surface for 5 months, then get yourself to Canet on the 15th May. About 240 bottles were left in a secret location by 8 wine makers of the “Galets Roulés” region around Perpignan, who claim that the pressure and darkness at that depth provide the perfect conditions for maturing the wine.
In the early days, we had been ‘talking’ to our shepherdess neighbour in broken French/Catalan/English when she had told us her son was called Raymond. Since that time we had cheerily called out to him when he went past in his car or we bumped into him at the market. He was always friendly and smiling but we had never really talked. Now, a day after our return from the UK, Raymond was striding across the lawn in a purposeful manner and my heart sank. I was sure that he was going to give us a good telling off for allowing Gyp to chase his mother’s sheep and I put a fixed smile on my face as I went out to greet him.
This first phase in the renaming, launched this week, “permet à chacune et à chacun de proposer un nom et nourrir ainsi la réflexion du «Comité du Nom de la Région», puis de l’Assemblée régionale”. (loosely translated as ‘allows everyone to suggest a name)
Asparagus season may be over, but who says we can’t cheat?
