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.
