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­­­Au revoir France, Hola Espana!

  A little flower shop on a tucked away street in Arles. 

We packed up the car, this time with five weeks’ worth of paintings, and set off on the next part of the journey.  Our destination was the little town of Perpignan on the Spanish border, but we left a few days early so that we could add two nights in Arles to our itinerary. Arles is  the city where Van Gogh spent the last two years of his short life.

Our first stop en- route was Nimes, an ancient city that was  a very  important outpost of the Roman empire. Larry had read so much about it and was eager to see the exceptionally well preserved double tiered amphitheater from 70 AD. This is still in use today and what we didn’t know was that the day we arrived, there was a bullfight scheduled. The old city was teeming with crowds, the roads were blocked for the street vendors and the traffic was so terrible that we eventually gave up without any sightseeing and headed for the Pont du Gard aqueduct nearby.

The Pont du Gard, a Unesco World Heritage site, is a must-see if one is in southern France.(buy tickets early online and get a guided tour)  It is a very well preserved three tier aqueduct bridge built by first century Romans to carry water over 30 miles to Nimes from the springs near Uzes.  The authorities have done a great job with landscaping the surrounding area to accommodate tourists and vehicles including phalanxes of tour buses. The facilities are spacious and well kept, and believe me, a WC in a public place in France is a great luxury.  We walked across the bridge, marveling at the scale and ingenuity. The engineering capability of the Romans at that time, with no computers or smart phones, is staggering and well worth reading about on the website for those who wish to understand how it all works. The views are so beautiful, it is as though those ancient builders knew just how to frame the landscape for ultimate viewing pleasure. With the graceful arches, rocky river shores and verdant vegetation, I could imagine Fragonard sitting at his easel, painting pretty young ladies in silks and satins on swings!

  Channeling my inner Rococo, imagining Fragonard painting here.

 Larry was thoroughly gratified to finally see the Pont du Gard. He explained it all to me:)

From there it was a short drive to Arles, the small city  where van Gogh lived from February 1888, until his death in 1890, although during that time he spent a year in an asylum in nearby St. Remy.  We were fortunate to have a room in a   modest hotel situated next to one of the gates of the ancient walled town, which made wandering around the ruins and down cobbled streets, easy and fun. Once a provincial capital of Ancient Rome, Arles is on the Rhone River.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum:)

The river front is undeveloped and quiet even though it serves many river cruise ships today.  The town has a laidback, cheerful feeling to it, with a small but well-preserved Roman amphitheater which hosts bullfights and events, but it has not been developed for tourism which seems to have happened without much fanfare. Restaurants are tiny, no big shops, just pretty sleepy squares, fountains, statues and a jumble of winding, cobbles stoned streets and alleyways.

  Photograph of Arles at dusk courtesy of Larry

The restaurant that van Gogh painted in The Café Terrace at Night (The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum) has not been preserved or rebuilt at all, and the spot is in fact shuttered and forlorn. There was an attempt by private developers to revive it for tourists but due to tax snafus the project folded. What an incredible opportunity for some savvy marketing entrepreneur! There is little in the city to celebrate its most famous painter, other than a van Gogh Foundation (also shuttered and closed with no explanation) and some plaques (couldn’t find them) where apparently, he would set up his easel. Van Gogh painted 200 paintings during his stay but the city does not own any of his major works to show the art lover who has traveled here to pay homage to the most popular post-Impressionist painter in the world! Despite its sleepiness, or perhaps because of it, Arles has been one of our favorites so far.

Many streets are lined with vines and flowers, but little gentrification yet. 

There is however, an extraordinary  and visionary project that has been developed just outside the city walls, in the area that was the old railyards. It is called the Luma and is a Foundation that directs and supports a creative campus “that  offers artists new perspectives for creation, collaboration and presentation of their work in public.” The  building, which is the centerpiece of a large park and lake,  was designed by Frank Gehry and is absolutely worth an hour or two of your time. The design of the exterior references the brush strokes of van Gogh in a very subtle way. We had never seen anything like it, it is quite breathtaking.  Read more at https://www.luma.org

The building facade is decorated with stainless steel bricks. It has 10 stories and  stands at 56 meteres, or 183.7227 feet. The drum or rotunda base references the ancient forum.

The entire project was conceived by and is directed and funded by private money. The founder, Maja Hoffman, comes from the Hoffman-La Roche  family, famous for founding  the company that became  Roche Pharmaceuticals. Similar to the Getty Museum, this project is an uplifting and inspiring example to me of how private enterprise in a free economy can contribute to the greater good.

Our good friends at the Residency had told us about the wonderful visit they had to the Camargue, a region near Arles on the coast, where big white horses and bulls roam free and migratory birds including huge flocks of flamingoes, can be seen. We set off from Arles but sadly, we both were very sick with food poisoning from our meal the night before. (The restaurant was the highest rated by Trip Advisor and written up in Rick Steves, and it was lovely except for some tiny organism that made us both sick) Neither of us was in the mood to wander about the beautiful swamps of the Camargue so we pressed on to Perpignan.

Perpignan was on our list because we both had read a lot about it in the context of the French Resistance in the Second World War, when heroes of the Resistance helped downed British RAF pilots, American airmen, Jews and others desperate to escape from Nazi occupied France, to neutral Spain, through the Pyrenees. Some of the stories from that time were retold in a wonderful historical novel by Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale, and while the heroine Isabelle is fictitous she is based on Ingrid de Jongh who devised the route known as the Comet line. Incredibly inspiring reading, highly recommend. There is also a wonderful movie about the American woman with a wooden leg (leg was named Cuthbert) who against all odds worked for the SOE (Special Operations Executive) as a spy conducting espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance, and also helped people escape through the Pyrennees. Her name was Virgina Hall, and a film based on her life was released  in 2020, named A Call to Spy. 

Who knew? One of my favorite sculptors, Maillol, was born and lived here. He donated many statues to the town. The red marble tile on the floor is quarried locally.

Perpignan turned out to be a strangely desolate town with no visible historical references to the escape routes through the Pyrenees in WW2. It’s a small town, with little apparent industry  or commerce, and almost no one on the streets in the Old City. It dates back to the Middle Ages and has a few interesting cathedrals and a beautiful “Hotel de Ville,” or Town Hall and I enjoyed a short tour of the sights to see with a lovely young college student guide named Chloe. There is a large North African community there and certain neighborhoods feel like one is in the Middle East, with groups of men sans women, drinking coffee in tiny sidewalk cafes.

One intriguing aspect of Perpignan is that it is home to a very large community of Roma, or Gypsies as they were called, estimated at 3,000 to 5,000. This community is so insular that no one really knows or seems to understand how it functions. Since current numbers put children attending school at no higher than 25 %  and unemployment at 90 %, little can be understood of their lifestyle. Ethnically Indo-Aryan, originally from Northern India, (although Christian) their communities in Europe date back to the 8^th and 10^th centuries.  Different branches of the culture in different European countries have distinct and different languages . Gypsies were regarded as “untermenchen”  (less than human, like Jews and Negroes, homosexuals and the disabled) by the Nazis and many were exterminated in the gas chambers. France has not had an unblemished relationship with the Roma, “le Gitan,” actually deporting 10,000 back to Romaina and Bulgaria as recently as 2009 and 8,300  in 2010! These actions caused a huge scandal in Europe as the deportations were technically on ethnic grounds, not legal grounds. The communities’ origins  and nationalities are so complicated and confused at this point in time, that government intervention on any grounds must be very difficult and fraught with accusations of racism. My guide told me about them being forced in recent times  into concentration camps.  They have their own code of behavior, rules and traditions regardless of the broader culture within which they live.

La Village de Pecheurs is a reconstructed village but still home to thirty fishermen, built on the banks of a beautiful lagoon.

On our way out of Perpignan, we drove along the coast and happened upon a very picturesque old fisherman village, where a few cottages built entirely of thatch, stood with fishing nets drying outside. Our attempt to explore and take photographs of this gorgeous area were derailed by clouds of the biggest  mosquitoes I have ever seen, so we scurried back to the car to continue to Barcelona. Despite our reluctance to brave the  mosquitoes we saw many hiking and biking groups and couples with babies. Apparently, the French are made of much sterner stuff than we!

Upon crossing the border into Spain, we found ourselves surrounded by vast shopping complexes notable for the bright colors of the facades: yellow and red juxtaposed was a theme, and if one watched the movies by Pedro Almodovar, the aesthetic really came to life.

Gaudi's architectural visions! What a surprise  to see this in real time!!

Barcelona is beautiful and charming and seems very livable, the little of it that we saw. We lucked out with our accommodation, a comfortable and nicely appointed but very  modest  apartment in an old building with views of the La Sagrada Familia ( Gaudi's fantastical magnificent cathedral ) from all three big windows with balconies!! Worth a million bucks for sure. Highly recommend the hotel company, Hostemplo, if this apartment is anything to go by.

Stay tuned for Barcelona and Antonin Gaudi, next episode!