Poverty in the Pyrénées-Orientales (“We may be skint, but we know how to party!”) Part 2 - Le Fenouillèdes

And now, as promised, to another beautiful area of the P.O. and one of France’s best kept secrets – Le Fenouillèdes or the Land of Fennel, the paradise in which I am so lucky to live. The region has hardly got off the ground tourism wise, let alone being in decline. It is bounded to the east and south by French Catalonia, to the north by the Aude, and to the west by the Ariège. My village in Le Fenouillèdes has a fairly new wine Domaine appropriately christened Le Bout du Monde (The End of the World). If you can ever find us you deserve a prize! We are set among vineyards nestling in a rocky and craggy landscape of densely wooded kermes oaks full of wild boar, roebuck deer, wild cats, genettes, foxes, badgers and all the rest.

Le Fenouillèdes is firmly Occitan country in the Languedoc, having become part of France as long ago as 1258 (Treaty of Corbeil). French Catalonia or Le Roussillon was finally transferred from Spanish to French rule much later in 1659 (Treaty of the Pyrénées).

Tourism-wise, our only significant development so far has been the creation of the Train Touristique which winds its lovely way on a goods line from Rivesaltes along the Agly Valley and through parts of the Cathar country to Axat in the Ariège.

As for the rest of Le Fenouillèdes – there is very little happening in the way of tourist development. A good friend of mine who has lived quite a long time in the heart of the region, miles from anywhere, reports to me thus:
The dream of tourism for the Fenouillèdes requires such enormous investment, just to establish the basis for the industry, that it will almost certainly never happen. … One of the first things which would have to change is the local inhabitants’ attitude to tourist visitors, particularly those who arrive in the area outside the “established” summer period of July and August. Anybody who arrives in the first six months of the year suffers a lack of good quality accommodation and an almost total scarcity of reasonable restaurants. Things are scarcely better in the last four months of the year! Of course, the Fenouillèdes is Occitan and therefore of much less interest than anything Catalan - the distribution of funding is telling. And of course there are all sorts of excuses, such as “reducing population”, “lack of places of tourist interest” and “difficulty of access”.

An academic study published by the Revue de l'économie méridionale (REM) in 1999 came to much the same conclusion, suggesting that the task of developing this “vast hinterland, peripheral and sparsely populated” was too daunting to envisage.

To end on more cheerful notes: thanks to serious investments by the County Council in various types of infrastructure including two large-scale logistics platforms at Port-Vendres and the St Charles interchange terminal, 20,000 new jobs have been created in the P.O. since 2001. And in the last year ending 30 September 07, unemployment has gone down overall in the P.O. by 5.3%.

It all helps!

Christmas all the year round

Poor they may often be, but the Occitans and Catalans certainly know how to enjoy themselves in ways which cost little. Their joie de vivre inspires them to turn almost every weekend of the year into Christmas-type eating and drinking festivities. After the high summer festivals of Sardinades, Bullinadas (Eel Stews), Cargolades (Grilled Snails), Paëllas etc, come the autumn gatherings including Castagnades (grilled chestnuts) and Olladas (pig stews using all the bits the Brits throw away, bulked out with cabbages, dried beans etc). Then scarcely is Christmas over than we all get together to tuck into a divine meal of truffled potato salads and truffled omelettes cooked by the mayor of a neighbouring village. Then in February and March come more Olladas, then Calçotadas (grilled large spring onions grown uniquely in a small area of Southern Catalonia), goat stews, méchouis (spit-roasted whole sheep), oyster fests, grillades of lamb chops, belly pork slices, black puddings and sausages … And so it goes on and on. More of all this anon.

Finally, we cannot remember just now, in mid-November 07, what rain looks like! And how can you not enjoy life when decent draft wines are here for the taking at around 1.6 euros, or a little over £1 a litre?

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année à tous!

Sources:
www.insee.fr (Institut National des Statistiques et des Études Économiques – the French Office of National Statistics and Economic Studies)
Several editions of L’Indépendant, October/November 2007
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© 2007 Basil Howitt