Stopover in the Gers

I barely had time to touch down at Nice airport, before it was time to hit the road again. This time we had a week of camping in the Vendee planned. Since the Vendee is on the other side of France (on the west coast, just south of Nantes), we decided to make a couple of stops on the way.

Our first stop was at Arles, just west of Marseilles (a suitable distance to drive during an evening). The idea was to get up really early Saturday morning, and clear the area around Montpellier before the main crowds arrived (today is the worst day of the year in France traffic wise – and the area around Montpellier is one of the worst places as half of Paris heads down to the Mediterranean beaches). Things went pretty well – we didn’t suffer from any bad traffic on the way to Arles, and had a very nice dinner at our hotel, as an extra bonus. And our plan to hit the road early in the morning worked out pretty well too – we made it to our next destination (the Gers) without much hassle at all.

The Gers is a very charming bit of French countryside located between Toulouse and Bordeaux, known for its tasty, if not very light cuisine (think duck and foie gras). The historic regions of Gascony and Armagnac are located here. Our first stop in the Gers was Condom. And what’s best is that the river Baise runs through it (if your French isn’t up to the job – look it up in a “rude dictionary” or something) – ‘nough said methinks! Condom, apart from having a funny name, has a rather impressive cathedral, and obviously has some kind of a connection with the Three Musketeers, since there is a statue of them in front of the cathedral. It’s rather a nice town, actually, so we decided to have lunch there, on a nice little square near the cathedral. I went all out foie gras – foie gras for starters and Steak Rossini as a main (an entrecote with foie gras). Yummi – I can confirm that I do very much like the local cuisine. We resisted the temptation to visit the Musée du preservatif (yes, there is one in Condom…), and headed on!

The plan was to spend the night at a nearby village call Larressingle, but before making our way there, we decided to do a short tour of the surrounding area. Our first stop was at an old village called Mouchin, which has a nice little Romanesque church (we also came across a little waterfall during our short hike). After checking out another nice Romanesque church in a nearby village, we made our way to check the Pont d'Artigue, a medieval bridge which is actually Unesco-listed, it being a very well-preserved example on a bridge used by the pilgrims on the Santiago de Compostella (which passes through the neighborhood).


After checking out yet another charming Gers village (this one endowed with a water tower, which had been rather creatively decorated by a local artist), we arrived at Seviac, which is famous for its Roman villa, discovered by the local parish priest in 1868. It’s quite a well-preserved site, the highlight definitely being the well-preserved mosaics (apparently this is one of the best sites in France for Roman mosaics). The guide who took us around the site also impressed not only with her knowledge of the subject matter but also with her dedication (I think her uncle was one of the guys who excavated the site or something). All in all, a nice little detour.

We finished our little Gers tour at Larressingle, where we were staying the night. Larressingle is apparently one of the most perfect examples of a Bastide type village (bastide signifies a kind of frontier village, often fortified, common in the South of France), my Lonely Planet goes as far as to say that it is “probably France’s cutest fortified village”.


I think that’s perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, and there isn’t much to see to be honest (the village only has a population of about 200, and most of those live outside the fortified bit of the village) but nonetheless it was quite a nice place to have an aperitif (one of the well-preserved buildings within the bastide’s fortified walls contains a bar). We then made our way back to our hotel for dinner (there is actually a great view towards the fortified village from the hotel garden, which is pretty cool…).

That brought an end to our brief exploration of the Gers department, as we headed on towards the Vendee. It was definitely a worthwhile stopover – what’s great about France is that pretty much any part of the country has some pretty countryside to enjoy, a pretty village or two to visit and a local dish or two to try out.