Do something different in France’s low-key charm, Languedoc coast

When French painter Gustave Courbet depicted the flat pale gray beach of the Languedoc coast in The Seaside at Palavas, in 1854, it was wild and empty, which is what makes the tiny man in a suit doffing his top hat at the low dark green waves rolling in off the Golfe de Lion so poignant.

Successive building booms tamed that wildness, first during the 1920s, and then again during the three decades from 1945 to 1975 that the French call Les Trente Glorieuses (the 30 glorious ones), when the country’s economy was thriving after World War II.

In the early 1970s, the government of French President Georges Pompidou, frustrated to see so many Gauls heading south to Spain for their holidays, drew up plans for new resorts on the Languedoc coast, notably La Grande Motte and Cap d’Agde. These huge blocks of whitepainted concrete holiday flats and hotels with affordable rates gave the Languedoc coastline its lessthan-glamorous reputation.

So the Languedoc was an unlikely spot for the trendsetting brothers Jean-Louis and Guy Costes to have opened the family’s first hotel outside Paris, the 72- room Plage Palace, in the low-key beach resort of Palavas-Les-Flots, eight kilometres south of the year-old TGV Montpellier Sud de France train station. Palavas-les-Flots, a 20-minute drive from the TGV station, is over a bridge from the mainland on a long, narrow barrier island with a series of lagoons on its northern shore and the Mediterranean on its southern one.

The Plage Palace in Palavas-Les-Flots is the first outpost from the well-known Costes family of hoteliers in Languedoc. (Picture: Gabrielle Voinot/The New York Tines

First step, find the hotel since it’s hidden by thick plantings and a wall of weathered planks and has no signage, the Plage Palace was not easy to find. Three times I went through a gate looking for a place to park, only to quickly find myself in front of the sign that said Sortie (Exit) and back on the road by which I had arrived. The hotel, a new-built, allwhite, Cubist-style, two-storey building, is pure Costes.

Outside the Costes’ compound, Languedoc offers low-key charms. (Picture: Gabrielle Voinot/The New York Tines)

The staff have been carefully cast from the young and beautiful, the property has a major design pedigree: the Paris-based interior architects Buttazzoni, Imaad Rahmouni and François-Joseph Graf collaborated on it. Lounge music thumps from speakers in the restaurant, and the wooden deck overlooking a heated saltwater pool and a neatly groomed stretch of beach is furnished with sun loungers, white umbrellas and a bar-restaurant.

Rooms, most of which have sea-views and private terraces or balconies, come with appealingly minimalist beach-shack décor (they start at €300 a night, or about R4 920). The restaurant has almost exactly the same basic, and expensive, menu as the brothers’ several restaurants and brasseries in Paris – dishes like steamed shrimp dim sum or tuna and avocado tartare, and in a rare feint at local gastronomy, a stew of bull’s meat eaten in the adjacent Camargue and grilled cuttlefish from the neighbouring port of Grau-le-Roi.

The decor at the Plage Palace runs to beach-shack white, including at the beach bar. (Picture: Gabrielle Voinot/The New York Tines)

After an excellent buffet breakfast at the Plage Palace, I set out to discover the appeal of the Languedoc coastline as a destination. Driving 19 kilometres east, I passed through La Grande Motte, and arrived at Aigues Mortes, a walled medieval town surrounded by marshes and salt pans.

In 1240, King Louis IX ordained the construction of a port in what was then a village of fishermen and salt harvesters that would serve as the embarkation point for French troops heading off to the Crusades in the Holy Land. His son Philip III ordered the construction of stone ramparts to completely encircle the town, and today these formidable fortifications are a French national historic monument.

From Aigues Mortes, I backtracked a few miles to the pretty little seaside town of Le Grau-du-Roi, the second largest French fishing port on the Mediterranean. At Le Vivier, a restaurant in the old town, I tucked into a 24-euro, prix fixe lunch of locally caught shrimp cooked in a crust of salt and rouille Gaulenne, a succulent casserole of stewed octopus and potatoes served with lashings of garlic mayonnaise, a local specialty.

Forty minutes west of Palavasles-Flots, the brawny old port town of Sète was built in 1666 to encourage commerce on the Canal des Deux Mers, which is today better known as the Canal du Midi. The port boomed after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. The outskirts of Sète are gritty and industrial, but the heart of the city, which is built on a series of canals, has a sepia-toned, 19th-century charm exemplified by Le Grand Hotel, a delightful three-star property with great canal views.

Sète, long well-known for its tieilles – pastry tarts stuffed with a ragout of octopus in a spicy tomato sauce – has recently become a great food town, too. I had a quick but delicious lunch of deep-fried merlan (whiting) and panisses (fried chickpea-flour beignets) at Fritto, a French style fish-and-chips shop, and rushed off to the Quai de la Resistance to catch the jousting on the canal. The first jousting tournament in Sète took place on July 29, 1666 to celebrate construction of the port.

Jousting matches have been held on the canals in Sète since 1666. (Picture: Gabrielle Voinot/The New York Tines).

Originally, tournaments opposed young bachelors in a blue boat to married men in a red one. The following day, the drive from Sete to Marseillan along the Etang de Thau on a road shaded by plane trees was blissfully bucolic. I was on a mission to scarf down a dozen oysters at Le Saint Barth just outside of Marseillan. This simple water’s edge seafood shack is run by the Tabouriech family, who farm the meaty, iodine-rich oysters that many consider the best in France.

At Le Saint Barth, the oysters come from the foot of the wooden deck adjoining the restaurant. (Picture: Gabrielle Voinot/The New York Tines).

After lunch, I took a guided tour of the Noilly Prat caves in Marseillan, where the Vermouth maker has been based since 1855 Noilly Prat is made from white grapes – Picpoul de Pinet and Clairette, grown in the vineyards that surround the town – and aside from the secret mixture of herbs and spices that season the dry fullbodied amber-coloured wine, its character, I learned, comes from a two-step aging process.

Slightly pickled, I walked into the old town of Marseillan to the fiveroom B&B Rue Galilee, where I discovered a delightful small hotel. This old stone house with blue wooden shutters was meticulously renovated by the Swedish owner Janne Larsson. The generous Scandinavian style breakfast, including herring and housesmoked salmon, that was served the next morning was excellent, too.

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