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Secret France: 20 hidden corners to discover in 2022

St Jean de Luz - Getty
St Jean de Luz - Getty

With the French ban on British tourists lifted, holidays across the Channel are back – and tour operators are already reporting a surge in bookings. But where can you go to escape the crowds? Here, our expert offer 20 suggestions, from unsung rural regions to overlooked coastlines.

Culture

1. Alsace

I met a fellow the other day who had never been to Alsace. He’d been pretty much everywhere else – Bali, Sri Lanka, Ulaanbaatar, Peru – but not Alsace. “Get a grip,” I said. “Plodding around the planet, leaving a carbon footprint the size of a soccer pitch, when Colmar – Colmar! – is only a few hours from London by train, that’s madness.” And so it is.

To be clear, Alsace is the most civilised slice of France, and the Colmar district its best bit. It is also – talk about having it all – the wine capital of the region. As such, it’s handy with food, too. Usually, lots of it. Eating and drinking moderately round here is feasible, but it’s a lonely endeavour.

Elsewhere, almost everything is just right. High-hued, half-timbered buildings press in on slim streets. There are wrought iron signs bearing pigs and peasants outside shops and sculpted Renaissance fantasy all over the place. The Lauch river splits into narrow channels overhung with wooden terraces upon which smiling people eat and drink and, frankly, get a bit annoyed with the flat-bottomed tourist barques floating past at arm’s length, boatmen parroting a commentary.

But boatmen have a living to make, and a minor wrong highlights the right. Notice, please, that the whole happy cacophony – gables, galleries, courtyards, cobbled streets, river channels – is overcome with flowers to a gorgeous degree. There is, withal, a sense of ancestral prosperity, of decent blokes and apple-cheeked matrons working hard, planting seeds, eating amply and cutting loose at festival time.

Read our complete guide to the fairytale region of Alsace.

An Alsace vineyard - Getty
An Alsace vineyard - Getty

2. Montpellier, Languedoc

France’s most seductive city? It’s not Paris, but Montpellier. It is elegant, cultured and tolerant, with Mediterranean blood coursing through its veins and dynamism to spare. Lacking industry, the place has majored on brains and bravura. World-class architects are forever turning up to add showpieces. The trams – designed latterly by Christian Lacroix as moving tableaux – have been called the sexiest in the world. It takes a startling city to make trams sexy.

Behind the Place de la Comédie, France’s most graceful central square, the medieval squeeze of the old town scurries with a sense of conspiracy in which everyone can join. Before rise some of the country’s more enviable contemporary developments. And, beyond them, the sea is a 50-minute cycle ride.

Find out more about visiting seductive Montpellier.

A cobbled backstreet in Montpellier - Getty
A cobbled backstreet in Montpellier - Getty

3. The Loir valley, Pays de la Loire

Confusing, no? The Loire is the big, grand one. The Loir is its tributary running roughly parallel to the north, before ducking down to join up around Angers. It is both more discreet and a lot more charming than its featureless big sister. Quite arbitrarily, I’m taking the valley to start at Vendôme, where the Loir has come off the prairies to steeper-sided settings. In town, it splits into dinky little channels, criss-crossing alongside lovely old buildings and gardens, walkways and trees.

Farther on, the valley chalk cliff walls close in to such an extent that, until relatively recently, locals built their houses and villages into the rock face. The most impressive can be visited in Trôo. There are châteaux here, too (notably, Le Lude), churches with magnificent frescoes (Bazouges) and leisure lakes for the incurably active. But the real Loir Valley experience is to wander from village to small town, beside curving river, field, rock and woodland, feeling that few have been this way before. Of course, lots have, but it doesn’t feel like it. Stop at Château-du-Loir and La Flèche – where the Loir meanders up to quays and castle – and, by the time you arrive at the Loire, you’ll be tempted to come straight back again.

4. Barcelonnette, Provence

It’s as delightful as it is surprising. At first sight, Barcelonnette is such an archetypal spot in the southern French Alps that you’d expect it to yodel. Come festival time (August), it is not yodelling you hear, but mariachi music. It’s as close as you can get to Mexico without leaving Europe – essentially because men and women from Barcelonnette, and the Ubaye valley, did leave Europe. They had traded textiles throughout the continent, then expanded operations to Mexico on its independence in 1821, opening shops, then department stores.

By the late 19th century, Ubaye folk were responsible for 70 per cent of the Mexican textile trade, and 27 per cent of all foreign investment in the country. Almost every valley family had members across the Atlantic. Many exiles returned to put up fancy houses in Barcelonnette. Others stayed on. It’s reckoned there are now up to 60,000 Ubaye descendants in Mexico, including Marcelo Ebrard, former mayor of Mexico City.

Away from the town there are glorious mountains to explore, and possibilities for hairy-legged endeavour are endless. There are seven cols (the ways in and out of the Ubaye) for the more insane sort of cyclist. Add rock climbing, mountain biking, rafting, canoeing, hang-gliding, canyoning and you’re knocked out before you start.

The five secret corners of Provence you must visit

Colourful buildings in Barcelonnette - Getty
Colourful buildings in Barcelonnette - Getty

5. Valence, Rhône-Alpes

This mid-sized county capital (pop: 62,000) is the finest French gastronomic destination that you’ve hardly heard of. I came away full of wine, reconciled with mackerel and (despite serious efforts) having found no one I wouldn’t want to share it with. For the foreseeable future, this is my favourite food spot. There are good reasons. The town is miraculously placed where all the stuff you need for a terrific meal flows in from nearby: the lower Alps, the Ardèche, the Rhône plain, Provence and the great vineyards – Côte Rôtie, Condrieu, Hermitage, St Joseph – which climb upriver towards Lyon. There are apparently local pigs, though I didn’t spot any.

And, as you know, man has been streaming up and down the Rhône valley – the corridor between the Alps and Massif Central mountains – ever since he’s been moving at all. There’s a tradition of north-south exchange and of passers-through needing feeding. Put all this together and you have a backlog of terrific eating. In the Thirties, a certain André Pic put the advantages to good use, establishing the Maison Pic for the more discerning Med-bound motorist. Thus was founded Valence’s contemporary gastro-celebrity. In the hands of André’s granddaughter, Anne-Sophie, Pic remains the sort of place where arriving in anything less than an Audi lowers the tone. Here is the sort of hushed imperial awe where customers are automatically considered discerning, and much hangs on one’s choice of bread.

Read more about Valence, including tips on what to do and where to stay

The Rhone Valley - Getty
The Rhone Valley - Getty

6. Berry, Centre-Val de Loire

Aubigny-sur-Nère is a half-timbered country town in a Caledonian cloak. The Saltire is ubiquitous, high-street shops have kilted blokes adorning their façades and there’s a three-metre monument to the Auld (Franco-Scots) Alliance outside the library. The place abounds in unexpected jockery, and has done, off and on, since the Hundred Years’ War.

Around 1420, Charles VII was having terrible trouble with the invading English. His own nobles being unreliable, Charles called on the Scots for help. Predictably, they came hurtling across the sea, some 10,000 or so under John Stewart to rip into the Sassenachs at the Battle of Baugé. Following that victory, they remained mainstays of the French military for 250 years. The links remain. Aubigny has its own blue and green tartan, its own whisky, an annual Franco-Scottish festival and, Lord help us, a pipe band.

Beyond Aubigny, there are Alain-Fournier connections in nearby Epineuil-le-Fleuriel; Bourges, with its wonky half-timbered streets are a toothless villain or two for medieval reality; and the surrounding Berry region – deep, green and much bypassed – exhales a sense of lurking secrecy.

Read more about Berry, including tips on what to do and where to stay


Countryside

7. The forests of Champagne and Burgundy

France’s 11th national park, the Parc National des Forêts de Champagne et Bourgogne (National Park of the Forests of Champagne and Burgundy), was inaugurated in 2019. The name assures us some decent drinking – though that isn’t, apparently, the park’s main purpose. The aim, broadly, is both to highlight and to preserve a 600,000-acre landscape straddling northern Burgundy and southern Champagne. It is deemed special enough to join, among others, the Cévennes, the Calanques near Marseilles, and the Vanoise in the Alps on the list of French national parks.

So we have the first such park in northern France, the first to cover a forest region and also a stretch where, to present, no-one goes. For those (and they are legion) desperately seeking undiscovered France, well, here it is. You’ve found it. Get cracking. For a start, the forest is exceptional – vast, with 15 different sorts of tree per hectare. Most were already growing when revolutionaries topped Louis XVI. In and around are deer, boar, weasels, proper wild cats and black storks. Some 450 miles of waterway afford not only kayaking and that sort of thing but also a chance to spot the devilishly rare white-clawed crayfish – which you are forbidden to pluck out and bring home, however great the temptation. It is protected.

Meanwhile, the forest itself affords 1,250 miles of walking and hiking paths along which you’re less likely to encounter other amblers than you are to see the carnivorous roundleaf sundew (that’s carnivorous as in eating insects, not humans). Around and about are grassland, prairies, farms and a sense of serenity withal. The whole is punctuated by stone villages nestling in little valleys.

Read more about the Champagne and Burgundy national park, including tips on what to do and where to stay

8. The Lot, Languedoc

Deeply rural, it offers light geo-drama: the Lot river and its tributary, the Célé, slice deep enough into the Causses limestone plateau for most tastes. And the region is shot through with courage – farming has ever been tough around here; so was the Resistance – and intelligence, at once entrepreneurial and artistic. The Lotois have been painting for 30,000 years.

Down from the plateaus, Figeac is where you start. Where I started, anyway. It appears a rustic spot (pop: 10,000) whose principal concern should be sheep. But this is the Lot, so the town has a vast aeronautics set-up, memories of the fellow who founded Egyptology, and also of one of Hollywood’s key Latin lovers.

I have long claimed Figeac to be the finest small town in France, small towns themselves being the best way to experience a country. Villages may be beguiling but are shut by 7.30pm. Cities are invigorating but avoid eye contact and steal your wallet. Smaller towns – population from 2,500-15,000 – have a human scale. There’s much hailing of one another from café terraces; it takes two hours to chat your way through the market to the strawberries. But, being towns, they are also vital, will provide fun and a drink at midnight, and don’t stare at strangers. Best of all worlds, then.

Read more about the Lot, including tips on what to do and where to stay

Figeac - Getty
Figeac - Getty

9. The Sarthe, Pays de la Loire

The Sarthe is hatched with hedges and woodland, plump with cows, apples, horses and unexpected hills which geographers, with starry-eyed optimism, call the Alpes Mancelles. Lanes no fatter than a farmer’s forearm snake through villages eager to feed you stews, potted meat (rillettes) and freshwater fish sufficient to gag Gargantua.

Its capital is Le Mans, where a taste for driving fast is sadly diversionary from the city’s real glory – a 22-acre historical centre unmatched in northern France for recalling medieval and Renaissance times. This was the early seat of Plantagenet power. Our Henry II was born in 1133 in what is now the town hall, and christened in the nearby cathedral. Beset by spidery buttresses, this looks like a giant Transformer toy. Inside, it soars from Romanesque to Gothic and stars, in the Lady Chapel, a lovely ceiling fresco of 47 angel musicians. One is playing a hurdy-gurdy.

The thing is that, if Henry returned tomorrow, he’d still find his way through cobbled streets weaving between ornate stone frontages, walled gardens and wonky half-timbered buildings apparently holding one another up after centuries-long debauchery. He would certainly recognise the extraordinary 26-feet Roman town walls (already 900 years old when he was a tot), though might be foxed by the designer boutiques, antique shops and hip restaurants which have snuck in behind sculptured façades. The sector has gone stylish. Thanks heavens. In a straight tussle between the squalour of real history and pleasant dining in a well-beamed bistro, I know where my vote goes.

Read more about the Sarthe, including tips on what to do and where to stay

The Sarthe river - Getty
The Sarthe river - Getty

10. Lozère, Languedoc

This is La France profonde at its deepest – and highest. At southern end of Massif Central, the county has highest mean altitude of any in the country. There are glorious uplands with no-one about, bar a few peasants, a real here-I-am, here-I-stand landscape, which includes the Cévennes hills and Causses limestone plateaus, plus the fabulous Tarn Gorges.

At the heart of the region, the village of Ste Enimie cures ugliness. Sometimes. A princess, Enimie bade God destroy her looks that she might avoid marrying the fellow chosen by her father. God obliged, then sent her to the distant Tarn Gorges, whose waters would restore her beauty. So they did, so Enimie stayed put, founding an abbey and the village. Granted, the Tarn waters haven’t worked for me, but they might for you. Meanwhile, we have a superb medieval village, climbing up its steep slope, overlooking the river and flanked by terraces where once, tenacious peasants grew vines, fruit and almonds. Now tourists hire canoes.

11. The Jura, Franche-Comté

This mountain range on the border between France and Switzerland is just two hours’ drive from Geneva, or less than three from Lyon, and while the latter is famous as a gastronomic destination the Jura isn’t terribly well known for anything. Yet this is the home of Comté, Morbier and Mont d’Or cheese, has delicatessens where the perfume of cured meat hits you when you walk in the door, and is becoming known as a region making lovely wine from indigenous grapes – the light, cherry-ish reds, Poulsard and Trousseau – and from the better-known Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Furthermore, above the vine-carpeted lowlands in winter there’s snow, and an amazing range of child-friendly activities, from downhill to cross-country skiing, snowboarding or snowshoeing. There is also hiking, so you can really earn those vineyard visits.

Read more about the undiscovered region of Jura

Hike your way through the Jura - Getty
Hike your way through the Jura - Getty

12. Beaujolais, Burgundy

The most famous unknown bit of France. Famous for the wines, unknown because no-one goes there. Serious mistake. To the north of Lyon and west of the Rhône, it’s a grand land of hills, vineyards on near perpendicular slopes, fine little villages and much over-indulgence. Some of the villages – notably the golden stone ones to the south of the region – would be standing room only, were they in Provence or Tuscany. But they aren’t.

13. The Gers, Languedoc

This is the thinking person’s rural alternative to the Dordogne. Every time I arrive amid the curved hills and sleepy valleys of the heart of Gascony, I feel I’m coming home. Every time I leave, I’m full of food and drink and have friends whose existence I hadn’t suspected a few hours before.

The landscape helps. Fat, rounded agricultural territory spangled with lakes and rivers, it is utterly charming but doesn’t overwhelm. The historical department's the same. There’s plenty of interest – fortified medieval villages such as Larressingle, castles, the legacy of local boy D’Artagnan, the Eauze Roman coin and jewel hoard – but little that demands awe. Which leaves ample time for the things you really want to do, like walking (notably in the Haut-Astarac), boating, swimming or, especially, gathering round a table. This is the county of foie gras, of confit de canard, of Madiran wine and of Armagnac. And, in my French experience, only the Beaujolais rival the Gers folk in their keenness to share it with all comers. You’ll need hours to spare, and an ability to stagger.


Coast

14. Roussillon, Provence

In France’s “Deep South”, a Catalan territory known as “Roussillon”, the Pyrenees end abruptly at the Mediterranean, creating cliffs and creeks, corniches, valleys and slopes so steep that vineyards are vertical. The region accounts itself extreme, fierce of sun, colour and temperament, given to the playing of rugby, the eating of anchovies and the cultivation of moustaches.

The coast is the glory of Roussillon. Roads wind up and down and around and around – and drop into Collioure, the start of the thinking person’s Riviera. Rooted beauty cloaks the slopes, à la Côte-d’Azur but lacks Brazilian bankers, Bono and Russian billionaires. The place belongs to Catalans, not the international flotsam and jetsam.

Over a few headlands, Paulilles seems the sort of isolated, wild and pristine bay where you’d come upon castaways, penguins or some other Mediterranean rarity. No surprise, then, that until recently it hosted a dynamite factory. Beneath slopes, Banyuls slots sweetly into its bay, promising the happiest of family holidays.

Read more about Roussillon, including tips on what to do and where to stay

Collioure - Getty
Collioure - Getty

15. The Opal Coast, Pas-de-Calais

On the Opal Coast south of Calais, farmland and heath sweep grandly up to Caps Gris and Blanc Nez headlands, where the wind might blow your arms off. Beaches fill more space than seems rightly theirs, as sea and milky sky compete to see who’s biggest. Nestling in the folds, Wimereux has no idea how attractive its modesty makes it. On the long promenade, and behind in the busy little town, locals are delighted to see us. They like Britons. We’re on the same wavelength. Charm overwhelms. Take a table at the Atlantic Hotel – apparently ready to set sail itself – and tell me I’m wrong.

16. Cap Ferret, Aquitaine

Cap Ferret is full-stop to the long lick of land closing the Bassin-d’Arcachon from the Atlantic. Surrounded by 20,000 acres of forest, and never-ending beaches on both the (tamer) bassin and the (wilder) ocean, it seems more a French colony than France itself. Hence, perhaps, its appeal to brighter, more discreet French A-listers (Marion Cotillard, Philippe Starck) for whom St Trop is de trop. Distaste for ostentation is de rigueur. The poshest villas give onto woodland tracks open to all. Holiday life revolves around beaches – best on the Atlantic is Le Truc Vert – boats, oyster-and-white-wine aperitifs at the oyster village shacks and dinner shoreside, perhaps mussels Chez Hortense.

Cap Ferret - Getty
Cap Ferret - Getty

17. St Jean de Luz, Basque Country

The thinking person’s Biarritz, Basque to its bootstraps and with beaches for all. Headland to headland, the curve of the Grande Plage beckons families with every safe and sandy summer promise. Rollers on other, nearby beaches are sufficient to chuck surfers about. But the fishing port still bustles and clanks, and substantial houses, white trimmed with oxblood woodwork, still expand to harbour generations. Locals remain as concerned with family, festivity and the flashing of balls (rugby, pelota) as with visitors who, since the Belle Epoque, have skipped across the surface. And that’s how it should be.

Read more about the beautiful Basque villages of France

18. Cancale, Brittany

Ten miles east of St-Malo, the little port of Cancale has been famed for centuries for ostreiculture – cultivating oysters on terraces flooded and flushed by the tide. The tides here at the western tip of Mont-St-Michel Bay – yes, the namesake abbey stands silhouetted on the horizon – are among the largest in the world, leaving scores of fishing boats stranded on the silty seabed. Just above, superb seafood restaurants jostle shoulder-to-shoulder along the quayside, so despite the summer crowds you’re sure of getting a good meal. Walk it off afterwards with a bracing hike to the dramatic Pointe du Grouin.

The oyster hotspot of Cancale - Getty
The oyster hotspot of Cancale - Getty

19. Gruissan, Languedoc

In contrast with Languedoc’s new-build resorts, Gruissan nestles at the bottom of a crag, spiralling out from what’s left of the castle like a tight-wound Catherine wheel. It’s rendered complex by insurgent sea and lagoon, land and water getting terribly confused round here. But the medieval core gives modern holiday frivolity a rooted dimension, even if we are only strolling the beach, amid the famous chalets on stilts. You’ll maybe remember these from the 1986 movie, Betty Blue, which introduced Béatrice Dalle to a grateful world. Beyond await the ridges, smoky pines and vineyards of La Clape, the only rocky bit of the Languedoc coast.

20. Mers-les-Bains, Picardy

You may not expect 100-metre chalk cliffs on the Picardy coast, but you get them all the same – before winding down to Mers, its endless beach and 600 white beach cabins punctuating the sands as sands should be punctuated. The resort, faded just right, nicely recalls the days when the French bourgeois summered here, in the lee of the cliffs. Their villas – soaring with turrets, multi-coloured galleries and other items from the outer fringes of carpentry – still enliven the sea-front, a barmy army of cartoon architecture which cannot but be cheering.

Additional contributions from Nina Caplan and Greg Ward.