June 2021

Camargue has been my dream destination since the moment Xavier told me about it years ago. At that time, I didn’t have a clear understanding of the geography of France and the only thing that captivated my attention was, unsurprisingly, the flamingos. I had no idea these gorgeous birds inhabited some southern parts of Europe and this knowledge smitten me completely. Years went by and Camargue was dragging on our bucket list without any perspective of being crossed out. Until the virus arrived and turned our plans upside down. Well, we didn’t cycle around Jordan after all but our new circumstances allowed us finally to take our time and go in direction of Camargue.

700 photos – that’s the number of pictures we brought from that trip. After mercilessly deleting at least twice as big number. With everything I wanted to put on the blog, making one big article about Camargue didn’t seem possible, that’s why we decided to split it into smaller parts. Ironically, the first one won’t be even about Camargue per se, as La Grande-Motte was merely our starting point before venturing further east. Still, this peculiar town definitely deserved its full place in our gallery. Without further ado welcome to La Grande-Motte.

Our morning view from the van

La Grande-Motte is one of many resort towns built on the Mediterranean coast of Languedoc-Roussillon, and yet it is very different. In the sixties, the French government was looking to prevent their citizens from migrating to Spain for the summer holidays and thus turned the coast into the main destination for mass tourism. It doesn’t sound sexy, does it? La Grande-Motte is the embodiment of that time, marked by massive construction of ugly sanatoriums, covering the littoral with concrete and attracting tourists in search of cheap holidays.

The architecture of La Grande-Motte was aiming to create a sort of a new style all together, combining the shapes of ancient Mexican temples with the idea of body lines and curves. Even if it might look sinister, I totally understand how such a town could make it to the “The XX century heritage” list.

Camargue is close!

Comparing the places we visit to the ones we have already visited is a bad habit I’m trying to get rid of, but thinking about Cala d’Or in Mallorca is unavoidable. Same white lines, same historic purpose, same aesthetics.

Check out: A Breath of Fresh Air in Gruissan

I understand why people might hate it and I also understand the fascination about such merciless and souless architecture which goes very far away from stylish architeture of rural areas of France. Don’t you?

We spent several hours in this town – just a few hours of a five-days trip, but no matter how beautiful and stunning everything we saw later was, my first memory of this escapade would be the white lines of La Grande-Motte smashed by the sun. Now let’s move on to real flamingos, not plastic ones.