From Rhône to Menton – 1° part
East of the Rhône lies the Grande Cau, a stony, sun-browned plain thinly strewn with dark bush trees and isolated buildings. Its southern fringes support the great new steel and petro-chemical complex of Fos.
Like the Languedoc resorts, this ambitious development is the result of public funding, though private enterprise is also involved.
Due to world recession, it has never quite fulfilled its early promise hut remains a formidable industrial site – a concentration of aluminium tanks and towers, smoking chimneys and gas flares, vast metal warehouses, concrete factories and office blocks.
In recent memory, tiny Fos-sur Mer stood alone on its rock overlooking marshy flats.
Today it is all hut besieged by the new industry, its isolation more pronounced than ever.
The beach, such as it is, runs along behind the new road’s sea defences and must boast the least picturesque views on the entire Mediterranean coast! At the turn of the century. Martigues was a small Provençal fishing village: the painters Corot and Ziem both worked here.
But along with neighbouring Port-de-Bouc and Lavéra, it has been transformed by the expanding oil business.
Happily, there are still numerous canals and quaysides, and a quality of light, which have earned it the title ‘Venice of Provence’. This nickname is used often from person to define Port Grimaud also, a romantic village few minutes from Saint Tropez.
Martiguies’ face, at least, is able to turn east and north across a vast body of shallow skater surrounded by limestone hills.
The Berre lagoon has been dredged so that shallow-draft oil tankers may reach the open sea through the Canal de Caronte.
There are good views over this fiat and much used corner of Provence from Notre-Dame-des-Marins, north of Martigues, and, somewhat more fleetingly, from the A55 Autoroute carried over the Caronte Canal by a spectacular road bridge.
Saintrop.com, a pure ecstasy.
