HOLIDAYS & TRAVEL
A Classified View
From Foix to Banyuls-sur-Mer
Nick Parmee writes:
My Personal Life Counsellor, who trained at the College of Negative Thinking, has warned that a pleasure shared is often a pleasure halved. The attractions of this corner of Roussillon are, however, so numerous that I can — grudgingly — risk giving an airing to one or two of them.
The destination was Banyuls, a few miles down the coast from much-painted Collioure and Argeli'.s, close to the Spanish border. I'd been there once en famille in the mid-Sixties and had found it not much changed from that time when we — Sally and I — went there in 1994. Once a fishing port, it is now at bottom a French holiday resort: not large, not sophisticated, not too busy, not too cosmopolitan; definitely not Nice, in short, with the wistful shade of M Hulot not far away. Last year, after three days of the powerfully urban experience of Toulouse, already baking in mid-June, we were glad to get on the move, first south via Foix, where three hours of drizzle told us that we were getting higher and closer to the Pyrenees, then west through a paysage of sharp-edged mountain, flower-scattered pasture, scented scrub and white-water defiles and gorges. We stopped to wander round the last shattered eyrie of the persecuted Cathars at Queribus and the vast and menacing 13th-century frontier fort on a precipitous ridge at Peyrepertuse, both with staggering views. Their great architectural and historical interest seems even to an anorak like me almost secondary to the natural splendour of the setting. When you get your ticket at Peyrepertuse, the woman in the guichet explains that if a storm blows up, as it can at any time and any season, one must come down at once.... I believed her.
Descending to a flat, dusty, plain of oleander, bamboo windbreaks and Zones Industrielles, we skirted Perpignan and were eventually in Banyuls, making for the Villa Miramar hotel, one of the most singular I know. It sits just below the crest of the hill that runs parallel to the coast and forms the spine of the town; being on the landward side, the outlook is to hills. One approaches from the tiny carpark on narrow paths through a garden wooded with pine and acacia; because of the slope, the building is on three staggered levels, creating a feeling that it is an organic part of its place. A deliberate effect, I am sure; Madame la Directrice — who had already been there a good while nine years ago — dresses rather as Janis Joplin did before the smack and the Southern Comfort got her. Indeed, there is a strong whiff of that period about the whole place. The rooms are intensively decorated: black marbled walls, pink bed linen; knick-knacks and objets trouves abound, with exuberant cane furniture worked into animal and flower designs — but with a fridge, of course: we are in France. Clever use of the levels gives a fairly secluded terrace area to most of the rooms; one does not have to pass Reception to get to them. Sculptures and models haunt the groves; around the pool a tape of jungle sounds — chattering monkeys, shrieking birds — is piped among the branches of the shrubs: one is suspended above the world.
Down the hill to the town, no more than five minutes. Banyuls has one genuine claim to fame: its Veil doux naturel, which varies in colour from garnet to gold and in age from two years to ten or more. The complexity of the best is as good as many better-known dessert wines; the cheaper grades make tip-top sangria, which we had at the beachside La Mare nda, as the sun set and the swifts screamed thinly high overhead. Dinner Chez Paul, an engaging man of local respect. His paella had in it chicken, rabbit, duck liver, belly pork, garlic sausage, mussels, langoustines and three sizes of prawn. It won. All along the front little groups gathered round musicians and singers; in the main square, women danced with each other to Fifties songs. But the regular evening petanque school ignored these distractions and played on under floodlights. The best team had among its members a thirteen-year-old Moroccan boy, whose job was to blast away the opponents' bottles when the cochonnet was blocked. He never missed: perfection.
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