Italy to Santiago II Part 1: Via Domitia Day 41 Aigues-Mortes - Palavas-les-Flots

E' come una danza e una preghiera, come una musica senza parole che segue il respiro antico del mondo, libera la mente dell'inessenziale e lascia spazio ai pensieri sulle cose ultime. 

(It's like a dance and a prayer, like wordless music to the rhythm of the ancient breath of the world; it frees your mind of all that is unnecessary and leaves room for thoughts about the ultimate things.)   

- Enrico Brizzi, Il Sogno del Drago (2017)

Aigues-Mortes was originally a port city, but today it is separated from the sea by five kilometres of salt marshes and salt flats, where the famous salt of the Camargue is extracted. I walked along the GR 42 / Véloroute 8 in between the waters, with the salt flats known as Les Salins to my left and the Étang du Médard to my right. An Étang is a shallow saltwater lake or marsh - favourite habitat of the flamingo, another well-known inhabitant of the Camargue. 

I walked partly on the paved cycling track, and partly on a somewhat muddy trail beside it. This brought me to Le Grau-du-Roi, where the canal flows into the sea; Grau is a local geographical term referring to the opening of a saltwater lake or marsh into the sea. 

Le-Grau-du-Roi is a pretty town with the canal running through the middle of it, lined with seafood restaurants on either side. But it was too early for that sort of thing and so I walked through the town and down to the beach, walking along the sand for several kilometres: after a little rain, it offered just the right compromise between firmness and softness underfoot.

From the Alps to the sea! The beach reminded me very much of the Adriatic shore after walking through the Comacchio area on the Via Romea Germanica last year: another walk from the Alps to the sea, another major river delta (the Po versus the Rhône). 

As I walked along the beach I could see some unusual constructions towering high above the sand in the distance. As I approached I thought, how ugly; but the closer I came, the more they grew on me. Once I was inside the town of La Grande-Motte, I learned to appreciate its beauty: the buildings are all white, all made of concrete, and all in the same style, experimenting with the capabilities of the material and avoiding the classic squares and right angles. Many of the buildings are pyramid-shaped.

A resort town largely built from nothing between 1960 and 1975 on virgin beachfront dunes, La Grande-Motte was planned by architect Jean Balladur, drawing inspiration from Brasilia, the purpose-built capital of Brasil designed by Oscar Niermeyer. Landscape architect Pierre Pillet collaborated on the project, selecting plant species tolerant of the marine climate; the town is artificially irrigated to create a green city. Construction has been kept away from the beach itself, and plenty of parking is provided within walking distance of the beach. The church, town hall, arena, street furnishings, even the public toilets are all built in the characteristic as the residential buildings. 

An additional note of interest was added by a series of life-sized "zombie" photos exhibited around the town, plus a Sunday morning market in the central square. I bought a square of Pissaladière, a sort of onion focaccia with anchovies and olives, and an orange, and ate them on a bench on the seafront promenade. 

Coming out of the town, I went back to walking along the beach, under an increasingly gloomy sky. When I came to Carnon, having walked twenty kilometres, I sat down to decide whether to stop there - the town has a couple of affordable hotels - or walk seven kilometres further to Palavas-les-Flots. I hadn't booked any accommodation in advance, as I wanted the freedom to decide how far to walk on the basis of the weather conditions, and the forecast was uncertain. It was not raining, so I decided I would carry on to Palavas. As soon as I booked my Airbnb the rain started coming down! But by then I was committed to walking for another two hours. In any case, it stopped. There was a surprising number of people on the beach, for a rainy day in November: people fishing, walking dogs, building sandcastles with their children... just outside La Grande-Motte, I even spotted a couple of men running down the beach into the waves - in the nude! 😅

I eventually reached Palavas-les-Flots, a prettier town than Carnon (another reason I didn't want to stop there was that the town didn't do much for me, aesthetically speaking), again with a canal running through its middle and a confusion of bridges that had me checking Google Maps repeatedly to figure out how to get to my Airbnb. At this stage in the day, nearing 30 kilometres, I didn't want to make any mistakes! I was fed up of walking with my poles tucked under my arm, my now unnecessary gloves in one hand and my peacock feather in the other - I found it along the way and it was so pretty I couldn't help but pick it up! So I let myself into the studio flat, dumped everything, took off my poncho and went back out to get something for dinner from the neighbourhood shops, which were miraculously open on a Sunday afternoon. 

Aigues-Mortes - Palavas-les-Flots 29.5 km

Italy to Santiago II Part 1: Via Domitia Day 40 Saint-Gilles - Aigues-Mortes

A man must invest himself near at hand and in common things, and be content with a steady and moderate return, if he would know the blessedness of a cheerful heart and the sweetness of a walk over the round earth.

- John Burroughs, Exhilarations of the road (1923)

I'm going to keep calling this road the Via Domitia. The GR 653D / Via Domitia trail ends in Arles; but the original Via Domitia road was built to connect Rome with Spain, and after Arles it passed through Beziers and Narbonne. It’s not known exactly what route the road took around modern-day Montpellier, but I doubt would have come through the marshlands of the  Camargue, long before the construction of today's drainage  canals. The route taken by the Romans is more likely to have been approximately the route taken by the Via Tolosana today, through Vauvert, Lunel and Gallargues-le-Monteaux; but I walked that way last time, in 2017, and I want to do everything differently this time. So the Camargue it is! 

The hospitalier volunteering in Saint-Gilles, Marc, accompanied me out of the town and onto the GR 42 trail, as far as the site of a spring associated with the legend of Saint Gilles. Here we said our goodbyes and I carried on alone on a dirt road through fields, vineyards, and the pastures of the famous white horses of the Camargue. 

About an hour into the walk I joined the Canal du Rhône à Sète, and I never left it again, all day. Not even when the GR 42 took a turn through the fields; I continued straight along the canal, on the former towpath, now a cycling track, part of EuroVelo route 8, Vélo Méditerranée, which connects Cadice, Spain with Athens, Greece and continues onto the island of Cyprus: a total distance of almost 5400 km! 

Well if all of it is this boring, that's one route I would not want to do! Though it makes sense on a bicycle, flashing through the landscape at high speed (compared to walking). There were lots of cyclists out there today, though I don't think any of them were planning on travelling all 5400 kilometres! One of them stopped to warn me of a danger ahead, which at first I didn't grasp: he said he had once seen a bull on the upcoming stretch of the path. Only once, though, he said. Then, if I understood correctly, he said he would come back and tell me if he saw any bulls. Well he didn't come back, and lots of cyclists passed by in the other direction, and there were no bulls on the path; still, the warning added a bit of excitement to an otherwise dull stretch of canal path! For the rest, the only variation in the monotony of the canal was seeing a sign ahead - wondering what it said - reading it - leaving it behind. Seeing a bridge ahead - getting closer - going under it - coming out the other side. Seeing a snail on the path. Oh, and once I saved a drowning dragonfly that had fallen into the canal and couldn't get out. I let it climb onto my walking pole, and deposited it on the grass. I was not so kind to the mosquitos! Though it's November, it's still warm enough that there are mosquitos around. I regretted having given my mosquito head net to Mariella when she went home, thinking it would be useless. I sprayed myself with Atlantick, a natural tick repellent made from eucalyptus oil which I figured would repel mosquitos, too. It did - but I forgot to remove my water bottles from my front pockets before spraying. So the first time I took a drink, I got a mouthful of eucalyptus-flavoured water, and tingly lips! Luckily, it's non-toxic.

A sign!

A snail!

Passing under a bridge!

The 98-kilometre-long Canal du Rhône à Sete connects the Rhône River in Beaucaire with the Étang de Thau in Sète, through which it is connected to the Canal du Midi. The idea of building the canal was first raised during the reign of Henri IV, though the project was implemented under Napoleon I, by connecting three older canals, for the purpose of shipping salt: taxes on salt were particularly profitable for the nation. Today the canal is used primarily for leisure purposes, by pleasure boats on the water and bicycles on the tow path. On either side are marshes in which a variety of water fowl may be seen, and heard, including great blue herons, egrets, marsh hens, cormorants, birds of prey and big white geese, the size of Canada Geese but all white. I haven't seen any flamingoes - yet! In the fields in between the marshes are the classic black cattle and white horses associated with the Camargue. 

The term Camargue refers to the region south of Arles between the eastern arm of the Rhône, referred to as the Grand Rhône, and the western arm, the Petit Rhône. The area is, logically enough, located in the département called Bouches-du-Rhône: the mouths of the Rhône. I crossed the Petite Rhône yesterday, and so I am actually walking across what is known as the Petite Camargue, an expanse of marshy plain located just to the west of the Petite Rhône in the département of Gard. When I crossed the Petite Rhône yesterday, I walked not only into the département of Gard, but into a whole new region of France: Occitanie. The region of Provence-Alps-Côte d'Azur is behind me!

Source: Wikipedia 

Geography lesson over; back to the trail. Eventually, after a very long time on the canal path, a tower came into view, far off in the distance. Eventually, it appeared closer. A couple of twists and U-turns in the trail allowed me to cross the canal on a road bridge, backtrack a little way up the canal I had just spent all day walking down, and get onto the tow path of another, smaller canal, which took me all the way into Aigues-Mortes. I stopped at the Super-U supermarket to buy dinner supplies, as it was right on the canal path, and I figured it would have a bigger selection than the small Vival supermarket in the town centre. By the way, for future walkers, there are a couple of villages just off the canal path along the way, with cafés, though I had picnic supplies with me, so I didn't add any extra metres of walking to check whether the cafés were actually open! 

After walking thirty kilometres, I was very happy to walk through the Gardette gate in the city walls and locate my chambre d'hôtes in the old town centre. After showering and washing out a few things I went for a walk around the town at dusk. The chief attraction in Aigues-Mortes is the town's well-preserved medieval walls, completed around the year 1300 under Philip III the Bold. Within these extraordinary walls is a fairly ordinary southern French town, with the addition of a generous dose of souvenir shops, hotels and restaurants catering to the tourists attracted by the picturesque sight of the walled city standing amid the marshes and salt flats. The name of the town comes from the Latin Aquae Mortuae, meaning dead or stagnant waters, and the area has been producing salt since Neolithic times. P

Chambre d'hôtes Le dit vin secret is in the home of an artist, Jean-François Monteiller, whose paintings are everywhere. As soon as I step out of my room I find myself on a glass floor with a view straight through to the common room/breakfast room downstairs. But after a thirty-kilometre day, I don't think I'll be stepping out of my room again before tomorrow morning! 🥱

Saint-Gilles - Aigues-Mortes 30 km

Tomorrow: the sea!