Roussillon

This is one of the landmark villages of France. 

 Quite a few of these exceptional villages have been earmarked as being amongst the most beautiful in France and deservedly so.


They even have their own special road sign that tells you it is so !!


Roussillon is actually one of the 'villages perches' - which simply means it a 'perched' village. Built on the top of an outcrop of rock (wouldn't quite go so far as to call this one a mountain) .

This was mainly done for safety in the days when neighbours mauraded n pillaged etc .... but these days the benefit is mainly in the fantastic location and even more magnificent viewsof the surrounding countryside.
Breathtaking indeed....

Well, we were totally wowed.

 This place was quite fantastic and we were bowled over by the beautiful range of ochres/reds/pinks/yellow/lilacs and other assorted colours which the seemingly haphazard arrangement of houses were decorated with.

All of which originate from the ochre coloured cliffs and quarries in the area around and by now under the village !


There is something like 20 kms of underground tunnels where the earth has been dug out, sifted, treated and sold on as paint colouring for various uses and this is still carried on today but with more mechanical means of extraction!!

There are various courses in the area where you can learn how to get the most magical effects using these wonderful soft colours.


 It is on my wish list to do one of these as I would just love to decorate the house in softly glowing colours next time. No more Dulux tins !! but hand mixed paints.


We were camped just 3 km outside this village for 6 weeks at a marvellous site called L'Arc en Ciel - the Rainbow !! It was a rambling, ramshackle sort of site, with lots of semi-resident caravans and nowadays chalets too.

It was run by two ladies, one a very friendly jolly lady named.......who ran the office and coffee shop/bar and the other lady, Geraldine, who did lots of the odd jobs around the place and whizzed about in her golf buggy scattering all ahead of her !

She was an absolute powerpack and both worked very hard to accommodate everyone and to keep the place ticketyboo.



I used to just love seeing her all swathed up in protective clothing, helmet, gloves, face guard etc attacking all the weeds and grasses with her enormous petrol strimmer!!

 I was full of admiration that she could do all that in the heat and still come up smiling and chatting and joking with everyone.

A real trooper and a really lovely lady too, and I was even more amazed when I learnt that last year she'd smashed her leg very badly.

It was full of pins and steel which had to be taked out at the end of this season. Crumbs....

It was a jolly place and many of the campers we met there had been coming back to the same site for umpteen years. 

 There was a brilliant pool, nice hot showers, a pizza van that came every monday and cooked fresh pizza in an oven, and thursdays there was another van which came with moules frites ! and a few extras too.

We had a great time at this site as it was handy for sightseeing, walking and cycling from.
 A great bonus for me was I could walk into Roussillon whenever I wanted to and just mooch about there admiring and of course, people watching.

There was quite a network of paths and cycle tracks in the area so we were never short of places to wander off to and it was all quite stunningly beautiful. I could live there quite happily.

Sadly, my other half thinks it is all too touristy and too busy by half but there are ways to avoid all this like going in to the village early morning for example.

 I quite like the buzz of market days and I'm almost sure that come the autumn the area is peaceful with just the odd tourist like us still hanging around !

We'll just have to come back and see, won't we ?

The weekly market was full of wonderful things to eat and buy - hard to resist sometimes and especially good was the evening market for the local producers to showcase their goods.

Huge cherries picked that afternoon were simply luscious and the local goats cheeses too - all in various forms (wrapped in vine leaves, sprinkled with peppercorns or local herbs, thyme mainly etc ) quite delicious.


The local vineyards also had their stalls set up in these markets. Tastings were free and encouraged !!

Roussillon had a thriving community centre where they had various exhibitions, salsa dance classes, martial arts classes etc and there was often music in the streets and of course at the local festivals. 

The Europeans seem to really enjoy an outing, for whatever reason, and wherever there is music there will be dancing and all alike join it.

Great fun and something that you don't see so often in the uk, and I just love a good bop !!



Enjoy the photos.

 I took hundreds and have selected what I thought were the most interesting/beautiful/arty/worth looking at ..... etc so I suppose that in fact I just chose them 'cos I liked them. I feel I will be happy in years to come and browse this blog and just reminisce about this gorgeous little village and its colourfulness.....

Enough of a reason really, well, for me anyway !