Tuesday 5/14/19 – I did another day trip today, this time south of Arles along the Mediterranean to a place called The Camargue. Funny thing was that two people from my tour yesterday were on this one and one lady actually lived in Charlotte 5 years ago. Small world!
The Camargue region, occupying the vast delta of the Rhône River, is one of Europe’s most important wetlands. This marshy area exists where the Rhône splits into two branches, just before it flows into the Mediterranean. Over the years, a steady flow of sediment has been deposited at the mouth of the rivers – thoroughly land-locking villages that once faced the sea.
Today the Camargue Regional Nature Park is a protected “wild” area, where pink flamingoes, wild bulls, nasty boars and the famous white horses roam freely through lagoons and tall grass. There are 5,700 animal and plant species (not including invertebrates) of which 489 are protected either nationally or worldwide. There are 150,000 migrating birds each year as well as three quarters of France’s bird species, half of its freshwater fish species and a quarter of its plant species. This area also has rice fields all over it and produces 90% of the rice needs for France.
The tour was in this cool 4 Wheel Drive Jeep that allowed us to go way off the beaten path and as the pics show we saw plenty of wild horses (loved the little babies!), bulls, pink flamingos and even a stork’s nest. We also stopped in this cool town along the Mediterranean called Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer and I included a few pics from there. They had a cool church that looked like a castle and I had to walk down and get a beach pic. On our ride home, we swung by an area on the outskirts of Arles where a new modern building designed by Frank Gehry (same guy who did the Bilbao Museum that I’ll see in a few weeks) is being built to house artwork for independent artists and special expositions. Enjoy!
Jeff
The Wandering Italian 