Sète: the seaside town with year-round sunshine in the south of France

While much of southern France closes its shutters for the winter, the fishing port of Sète comes alive. The oyster and truffle seasons are in full swing and bright, sunny weather makes it the perfect place to sip a glass of muscat on the banks of the town’s Canal Royal.

The main town on the Thau archipelago, 17 miles (27km) south-west of Montpellier, Sète has a strong maritime feel, with nets, floats and trawlers tied up along its waterfront. It also has a handful of excellent museums, pocket theatres and an open-air gallery of street art. The town was founded in 1666 when Louis XIV was looking for a harbour for his royal galleys and it expanded hugely in the 19th century as a major port for the wine, wool and wood trade.

Today, Sète is all about fish … and water jousting. Although the tournament takes place late in August, even in winter preparation and training is under way for the joutes, spectacular water jousts on the canal. It has been going on for over 350 years and involves two teams dressed as sailors charging at each other in a bulky rowing boat carrying musicians and a lone, elevated jouster who tries to batter their opposite number into the water with a lance.

This major Sète event is explained in all its elements at the town’s Musée de la Mer and shop windows are full of striped sailor tops and straw boaters as well as brass compasses and fishing equipment. The town’s main corniche twists round the archipelago past a fishers’ cemetery where the poet and philosopher Paul Valéry is buried. Valéry was born in Sète in 1871 and a museum dedicated to him sits high above the town in a huge modernist-style gallery. Cabinets of his private letters, sketches, notebooks, self-portraits and his silver fountain pen contrast with the exuberant contemporary art in the adjoining rooms. A startling exhibition of female artists, Nazanin Pouyandeh and Brigitte Aubignac, continues until the beginning of March.

Over the other side of what Valéry called his “singular island” (Sète is surrounded by canals, the Thau lagoon to the north and Mediterranean to the south) is the Espace Georges Brassens. One of France’s most celebrated singers, Brassens spent his childhood in Sète in the 1920s before moving to Paris and a life of cabarets and composing a particular type of jaunty chanson, turning a life of near destitution into the gold discs, manouche guitars and recording contracts that line the walls of the centre.

I discovered that he knew almost 200 songs by heart by the age of five, that he wrote his lyrics out on school notepaper and transformed from a scandalous cabaret singer in the 1950s to selling 20m albums a year by the mid-1970s. Like Valéry, he is buried in a cemetery across the street.

The strangely named Musée International des Arts Modestes is also entertaining. A shop-front entrance where the town’s two main canals meet leads into a former wine warehouse. The top floor is devoted to dioramas of childhood objects by artist and co-founder Bernard Belluc: school chemistry projects frozen in space, toy cars, plastic dinosaurs and transistor radios. The museum’s first two floors house temporary exhibitions that pay tribute to the obscure: kitsch art by new age painters, and works inspired by pulp fiction, sci-fi and popular culture. It’s a palace to the extraordinarily “modest”.

The town’s energy and maritime charm attracted Jean-Jacques Ferron, who fell in love with the place in 2018 and decided to rebuild a ruined house overlooking the main square. “It was the old police station,” he tells me. “The balcony was in the middle of the building and downstairs, some grim-looking dungeons. It had no roof and had been abandoned for 20 years.”

Ferron worked in New York for four decades as an artist, architect and conceptual designer and is drawn to nature and eco-friendly projects. “Spending time in New York City, we get the need for maximising space, so I brought that with me to Sète.”

There’s a stone waterfall in his cafe’s dining room and he has handmade all the furniture from natural elements, importing 20 tonnes of limestone from Spain. The cafe serves craft beer from Béziers and healthy, homemade food, hence the name La Maison Verte (green house). Upstairs are four cool apartments for rent and the kitchen ceiling is made from large tin tiles, imported from Brooklyn to prevent fires.

“I wanted to bring a bit of Brooklyn to the coffee shop idea. In France, they’re stuck on lunch from 12-2pm but we are open all day until 7pm and people can eat whatever they want.”

Ferron says La Bombonnière, a green kiosk on the Place Léon Blum, sells some of the best tielle, Sète’s speciality octopus and spicy tomato pies. La Marine fish restaurant on the Canal Royal serves a dozen cuttlefish in parsley sauce or a sea bream cooked in Noilly Prat – the vermouth’s production plant is only 15 miles away in Marseillan. Restaurant Aux Copains d’Abord, a few doors down and named after Brassens’ best-known song, serves six oysters and glass of wine for just €10. On the east side of the canal, the Marcel does an octopus roasted with pork cheeks, watercress mousse and clementine-flavoured vinegar sabayon as part of a €78 four-course dinner.

At eight in the morning, I am at Les Halles, the giant covered market, looking for a café-crème and croissant and the place is already packed. Stalls are selling glistening Atlantic wolffish laid on beds of iced mussels and clams with stacks of winter vegetables, charcuterie and cheese. There’s an oyster bar, plenty of noisy cafes and a clothes shop called Tentation.

Winter is truffle season. By Sète’s mid-January truffle fair, most of the dense black truffles are at least the weight of a golf ball. You can have a truffle omelette made on the spot or take a sniff from a plastic container kept under the counter. At Truffe d’Elite, the owners found that their doberman dog proved to be an expert truffle-hunter and showed me a video of him snuffling and then digging up a large truffle. Prices this year are about €1,000 per kilo, so €25 buys a conker-sized orb for a week’s worth of truffle-flavoured scrambled eggs.

Sète bustles year round. At the August water jousting, 15,000 visitors cram along the waterfront, but even on a winter’s day – it’s a mild 14C – everyone’s out, queueing up for a tielle at Sophie Cianni & Co on the corner of Rue Mario Roustan or a seafood platter along the Quai Général Durand.

Perhaps the most authentic place for six oysters and a glass of white muscat is the row of bars along La Pointe Courte on a tip of land just north of the railway tracks. The tiny district is a cross-hatch community of fishers’ cottages on lanes too narrow for cars and far from the tourist trail. Agnès Varda’s 1955 film Pointe Courte was shot here and became a big influence on France’s nouvelle vague movement. Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort play a Parisian couple with relationship problems, but there’s also  a lot of water-jousting.

The Grand Hotel has double rooms overlooking the Canal Royal from €135 room-only