For information on both hotels, visit www.hotel-bordeaux-centre.com
In Bordeaux, treat yourself to a meal at La Tupina, by the Porte de la Monnaie, for some of the finest pork you’ll ever eat, from the cul noir breed.
La Tupina, 6, rue Porte de la Monaie, 33800 Bordeaux • Tel: +33 5 56 91 56 37 • Fax: +33 5 56 31 92 11 • [email protected] • www.latuina.com.com
HOTELS IN ST. ÉMILION
I recommend the Logis des Remparts Hotel, at 78 to 105 euros per night for two in a double room. 18, rue Guadet, 33330 Saint-Émilion • Tel: +33 5 57 24 70 43 • Fax: +33 5 57 744 744 • [email protected] • www.logisdesremparts.com
In Bergerac, the Hotel de France is 70 to 90 euros for a double room with breakfast. 18, place Gambetta, 24100 Bergerac • Tel: +33 5 53 57 11 61 • Fax: +33 5 53 61 25 70 • [email protected] • www.hoteldefrancebergerac.com
For the rest of the stay, or for the whole week, I recommend the less expensive Auberge Médiévale in the tiny but pretty village of Audrix, about 3 miles from Le Bugue, where in May, June, and September bed and breakfast for two in a truly medieval inn costs only 40 euros a night. On Saturday nights in summer, Audrix hosts one of the best nighttime markets in the village square, where the bread is cooked in a giant communal oven in the shadow of an eleventh-century church. Buy your lamb and steaks and cheese and foie gras and wine from the stalls and eat at the massed ranks of tables and benches provided. There is often music and dancing. The Hotel of the Medieval Inn is 56 euros for a double room with breakfast. Auberge Médiévale Le Bourg, 24260 Audrix • Tel: +33 5 53 07 24 02 • Fax: +33 5 53 04 99 78 • [email protected] • www.auberge-medievale.fr/aubergeanglais.htm
The Domaine de la Vitrolle, just outside Limeuil on the road to Le Bugue, is a charming small château, used as a secret Resistance headquarters by André Malraux in the summer of 1944. Rooms in the château are 110 euros a night for a suite, 85 euros for a room, all decorated in nineteenth-century style with some fine antiques. It has more than 20 self-contained gîtes on the grounds, which rent for 760 euros per week for a two-bedroom apartment with a sitting room and kitchen, plus a delightful annex with four rooms and its own chapel. Set amid orchards and vineyards and overlooking the river, it has figured in several Bruno novels, inspiring the Domaine in The Dark Vineyard and the scene of the summit in The Crowded Grave. For a vin de table, it now produces remarkably good Merlot and Semillon, thanks to a gifted winemaker, John Alexander. 24510 Limeuil, Dordogne, Périgord • Tel: +33 5 53 61 58 58 • Fax: +33 5 53 61 05 27 • [email protected] • www.la-vitrolle.fr
For the mid-price budget, try the Hôtel du Château in Campagne, between Le Bugue and Les Eyzies, where a double room with breakfast is 120 euros. Le Bourg, 24260 Campagne • Tel: +33 5 53 07 23 50 • Fax: +33 5 53 03 93 69 • [email protected] • www.hotelcampagne24.fr
For those wishing to splurge, the Vieux Logis in Trémolat is wonderful. Dinner, bed, and breakfast for two is 360 euros a night, but for that you get one of the finest dinners in the world. The menu du marché changes daily and is an extraordinarily good value. Henry Miller stayed here, fell in love with the place, and wrote, “I believe that this great peaceful region of France will always be a sacred spot for man and that when the cities have killed off the poets this will be the refuge and the cradle of the poets to come. I repeat, it was most important for me to have seen the Dordogne: it gives me hope for the future of the race, for the future of the earth itself. France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.” Le Vieux Logis, 24510 Trémolat • Tel: +33 5 53 22 80 06 • Fax: +33 5 53 22 84 89 • [email protected]
Farther north, the Château de la Fleunie is a beautiful place to stay. Rue d’Aubas 24570 Condat-sur-Vézère • Tel: +33 5 53 51 32 74 • Fax: +33 5 53 50 58 98 • [email protected] • www.lafleunie.com
Larger groups may want to rent a château. The charming Château de Cardou, for example, about three miles from Lalinde and less than 30 minutes from Bergerac airport—sleeps ten and rents for roughly 3,000 to 5,000 euros a week, depending on the season. www.simplychateau.com/dordogne/chateau_de_cardou
Château le Treillac in Alles-sur-Dordogne, just outside Le Buisson, sleeps up to 17 and costs from 3,000 to 5,000 euros a week. • www.simplychateau.com/dordogne/chateau_le_treillac
Those with a very large budget might enjoy staying at the Château des Vigiers, about 12 miles southwest of Bergerac. Château des Vigiers Golf & Country Club, “Le Vigier,” 24240 Monestier • Tel: +33 5 53 61 5000 • Fax: +33 5 53 61 50 20 • www.vigiers.com
For renting gîtes, I recommend the wide selection and good (English-speaking) management of Simply Périgord • Tel: +33 5 53 54 54 31 • www.simply-perigord.com
The Perfect Week
DAY ONE—Bordeaux
The main tourist office, where wine tours and tastings are on offer, is at: 12 cours du 30 Juillet, 33080 Bordeaux Cedex • Tel: +33 5 56 00 66 00 • Fax: +33 5 56 00 66 01 • [email protected] • www.bordeaux-tourisme.com
Bordeaux was built on wine. Today, the regional wine trade is worth 15 billion euros a year and produces almost a billion bottles. In Bordeaux, visit the old wine quarter known as Les Chartrons, where the wine négociants built fine houses and where you will find the History of Wine Museum.
Must-see sites in Bordeaux:
The main riverfront of the west bank is marvelous, like an urban version of Versailles, and strolling along it is a delight. The Place de la Bourse is sublime, and don’t miss the monument to the Girondins in the Place des Quinconces. The Porte Cailhau, the fifteenth-century entrance to the city, has a great view from the top. The Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1801 by Napoléon Bonaparte, is worth a visit if only because of its location in the Palais Rohan (the city hall of Bordeaux). On Sunday, try the market of Le Marché des Quais in Chartrons, along the quayside. On Friday or Saturday, the market to visit is Le Marché des Capucins, a covered market.
Classic sites are:
• Saint-André Cathedral, consecrated by Pope Urban II in 1096. Eleanor of Aquitaine was married here in 1137. Of the original Romanesque church only a wall in the nave remains. The entrance is still known as the Royal Gate and was built in the generation following the death of Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1204. Most of the rest was built while the English still held the city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before they were expelled in 1453.
• Tour Pey-Berland (1440–1450), a massive, quadrangular tower annexed to the cathedral.
• Église St. Croix (Church of the Holy Cross). Few places reveal the early tumultuous history of the city. First built as a Benedictine abbey in the seventh century, the Saracens destroyed it in 730 A.D. It was rebuilt over the next seventy years and completed under Charlemagne, only to be looted and demolished again in the ninth century by the Norsemen (who later settled in France and became known as the Normans). The current Romanesque church was mostly built in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. A nineteenth-century restoration added the tower to the left of the entrance for symmetry.
• The gothic Basilica of Saint Michael, late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
• Basilica of Saint-Seurin, the oldest church in Bordeaux. Built in the early sixth century on the site of an early Christian tomb, it was destroyed by the Normans in tenth-century raids. Only the portico of eleventh-century rebuilding remains. Amid the widespread changes that came with rebuilding in the nineteenth century, the twelfth-century apse remains, along with parts of the thirteenth-century nave and chapels from the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. The ancient crypt has tombs of the ruling Merovingian family.
DAY TWO—Wine: St. Émilion, Monbazillac, and Bergerac
Château Monbazillac
St. Émilion is a lovely old town, very good for strolling, and with fascinating underground cellars, quarries, and a famous underground church. The tourist office has good advice on visiting
local vineyards. The Hostellerie de Plaisance offers excellent food but is not cheap. I prefer L’Entre Deux Verres, an excellent wine bar with decent food at the foot of the Tour du Roy. www.saint-emilion-tourisme.com/uk
In Monbazillac, visit the delightful Renaissance château, with a good café for lunch on a terrace overlooking the Dordogne Valley and tastings of the lovely sweet white wine. The château also does a decent Pécharmant red.
Bergerac
In Bergerac, in the heart of the old city, don’t miss la Maison des Vins. It occupies a splendid piece of seventeenth-century architecture, with the charming Récollets’ cloister named after the Franciscan beggar monks who built a monastery there on the orders of Louis XIII. Pick up a map of the vineyards, with details on times of opening, and so on, called the Route des Vins.
For vineyard visits and wine tastings: I recommend Château de Tiregand (Bruno’s favorite Pécharmant red), Château Belingard, and Château de la Jaubertie, but do visit the famous cave of Julien de Savignac in Le Bugue. This is one of the world’s great wine stores (and the inspiration for the wine shop in the Bruno novel The Dark Vineyard). Pierre Desmartis at La Vieille Bergerie, just outside Bergerac, won three gold medals in a row at the big Paris agricultural show for his splendid dry white called Quercus, only 8.50 euros a bottle.
DAY THREE—The Dordogne Valley to Sarlat
Château in Beynac
When showing friends the area, I start in Le Bugue (which on Tuesday mornings has the best market in the region), take the road to Le Buisson (a good market on Friday), and then head upstream. Another way to start is to take the road from Le Bugue to Audrix and then continue to Le Coux et Bigaroque and to St. Cyprien (an excellent market on Sundays) and then rejoin the D703, which follows the river.
Château de Milandes
Essential stops are the two great castles of Beynac and Castelnau, from which the English and French glowered at each other during the Hundred Years’ War. Each is worth a visit. Beynac is where the 1999 version of Joan of Arc was filmed, and small boys of all ages up to eighty-five and beyond delight in Castlenau, with its reconstructed medieval siege machines, including mangonels and trebuchets, and the chance to don some armor and try a sword fight. The wife of the lord of Castelnau thought the place a bit grim, so persuaded him to build the charming Château de Milandes close by. American nightclub artist Josephine Baker bought it in the 1930s and bravely turned it into a Resistance center in World War II and it’s a good place to visit. Then drive on to the magical village of La Roque-Gageac (see restaurant section for lunch recommendations) and then to the hilltop medieval town of Domme, with its great views.
I usually end the tour at the lovely old town of Sarlat, where we simply enjoy its charm for a few hours. But you can also continue upstream from Souillac to Sousceyrac and Bretenoux, charming villages and a pretty drive.
Town of Sarlat
Sarlat is magical, a town whose center was largely built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and has changed little since. Another version of The Three Musketeers could be filmed here without changing anything except for a few modern shop windows. It stayed that way because the local swamps and malaria put the town into a long decline with little new building until DDT tamed the mosquito.
DAY FOUR—The Vézère Valley, Lascaux, Les Eyzies
Le Centre d’accueil de la Préhistoire
The Vézère Valley is known to the tourist board as the cradle of mankind, since this is where Homo sapiens, or the Cro-Magnon people, were first found. Les Eyzies is the center, with its excellent modern National Museum of Prehistory and its associated reception center, Le Centre d’accueil de la Préhistoire, which offers a simple introduction to the times from 10,000 to 100,000 years ago.
From Les Eyzies, the drive up the valley to Lascaux is very pretty, and I usually stop for lunch in the village of St. Léon sur Vézère. Le Petit Léon is a restaurant I enjoy, but along the riverbank near the church is a small snack bar for sandwiches and light meals. After visiting Lascaux, drive 6 miles east to St. Amand-de-Coly and decide for yourself which of these two villages has the better claim to be France’s prettiest. In my view, the river gives St. Léon the advantage. It’s also worth visiting the fascinating nearby prehistoric site of Castel-Merle, where you can try your hand at making flint knives and using a spear-thrower.
The Lascaux cave must be seen, even if it is only a perfect modern copy. It is indeed, “the Sistine chapel of prehistory,” an unforgettable experience that overwhelms the visitor with art, history, and also something hard to define but powerfully spiritual. You will never again think of cave people as primitive. The artists may have lived 17,000 years ago, but they were evidently people who were, in at least one fundamental way, much like us, with aesthetic sensibilities that we can recognize across the centuries. Along with language and humor, the need to produce art seems to be a defining human characteristic. My own fascination with Lascaux and the kind of culture that might have produced its art lies at the heart of my pre-Bruno novel, The Caves of Périgord. Tickets for the tours of the cave (available in several languages) should be booked in the central tourist office in the nearby town of Montignac.
DAY FIVE—The Bastides, or Caves and More Caves
Monpazier Bastide
The Bastide towns are a splendid example of medieval town planning. Built as new market towns that were also fortresses, they had big squares for the market, defensible walls, and a sturdy church to act as bastion. The English and French each built them during the Hundred Years’ War for defense in depth but also because the markets provided tax revenues that could go to the king rather than to traditional local barons. Monpazier, Beaumont, Eymet, Molière, and Domme are fine examples. Each also holds special events in summer, such as antiques fairs (called brocantes) and book or wine fairs.
If, like me, a visit to Lascaux stirs your curiosity about the caves and prehistoric art, it’s worth knowing that there are 147 prehistoric sites and 25 painted caves in the Vézère Valley.
Font-de-Gaume
Here are my recommendations:
• Cap Blanc: Wonderful animal statues emerge from the rock.
• Grottes du Roc de Cazelle: Kids love the statues and tableaus that seek to re-create the way people used to live.
• Font-de-Gaume: More than 200 paintings and engravings of mammoths, bison, deer, and horses.
• La Roque Saint-Christophe: A huge cliff with a long ledge where people lived from 55,000 years ago, and well into the Middle Ages. There is a legend that English troops abandoned some treasure here in the Hundred Years’ War.
• Rouffignac: A huge cave with its own train to get you inside, and endless engravings of mammoths.
DAY SIX—Cadouin, Trémolat, Sainte Alvère, Limeuil, the River by Canoe
Cadouin
The best way to enjoy the river is by canoe, although the wooden gabare boats on the Dordogne are fun. Canoe rentals can be found anywhere, but I recommend the ones in Les Eyzies, St. Léon sur Vézère, and Canöes des Courrèges, just outside Le Bugue on the road to Le Buisson. Even though the current is in your favor, don’t try to go too far. Les Eyzies to Courrèges is a good morning’s work, and St. Léon to Les Eyzies is very beautiful but may be too long for kids unless you take a picnic lunch and stop and swim along the way.
There are villages so lovely they take your breath away, and much of the pleasure of the Périgord is to potter from village to village, from café to café, buying the local bread.
I never tire of the sight of Bigaroque from the bridge where the road from Le Bugue to Le Buisson crosses the Dordogne. Instead of turning right to Le Buisson, go straight ahead and it is right there.
Cadouin is a charming old village with a magnificent twelfth-century abbey and magical cloisters, and in the second half of August the town holds a medieval festival. Part of the old pilgrim trail to Santiago de Compostella in Spain, it was famed in the Middle Ages for its great relic, a piece of the Holy Shroud, which turns
out to have been made in the eleventh century.
Trémolat, where the river is wide enough for the French waterskiing championships, has a lovely twelfth-century Romanesque church with great frescoes, built atop the original ninth-century foundation. Claude Chabrol filmed Le Boucher in this village.
Jardin de Limeuil
Limeuil, where the Vézère flows into the Dordogne, is a delight, a lovely old town with a château and a park atop the hill; it has one of the prettiest mairies in France, with a fine garden from which to admire the view. Le Chai, beside the river, is one of the world’s great pizza houses, serving varieties I never dreamed existed and with an amazing running and flying waiter who soars over steps with your order. Try ordering the excellent cider instead of wine.
Sainte Alvère is famous as the home of the truffle market (see my third Bruno novel, The Black Diamond), held on Monday mornings from December 1 to March 1 every year. But it is also a pretty town, with a ruined castle and one of my favorite cafés, just across the road from the truffle market. Truffles can also be bought online.
DAY SEVEN—Périgueux and Return to Bordeaux
I really like Périgueux, even though its outskirts make you think of American malls and sprawl. Focus instead on the Roman ruins and the amazing Byzantine-style cathedral with its domes and cupolas that make you rub your eyes and wonder if you’ve landed in Istanbul by mistake. It was restored in the nineteenth century by the great architect Abanie, and became the model of the more famous Sacré-Coeur, which overlooks Paris from the hill of Montmartre. There are bits of the old church that date from 1074 at the western end, and on either side are the two confessionals that are even older. Some of the oldest parts, including the tomb of St. Front, were destroyed by the Protestants when they seized control of the city in 1575 during the religious wars. They secretly crept into the city on a market day, disguised as peasants, with swords concealed beneath their cloaks, and kept control of the place for six years.
Bruno, Chief of Police Page 24