Visit Uzes. It's Really that Beautiful!
We had just spent three weeks traipsing all over the Languedoc province, hoping to find a vacation home to buy.
And it was all ending up in a disaster because nothing Linda saw met her stratospheric requirements. The river-side home set in one of France’s most beautiful natural parks (the home was featured on the cover of a tourist guide to the area, no less!) wasn’t good enough. The one on the Orb river, with one of Secret France’s most desirable villages within easy walking distance, didn’t catch her fancy either.
The home begging to be built in the middle of a vineyard? She walked away without a second thought. Or the one in the Pyrenees Mountains with the dreamy blue shutters…the one that had a working bread oven in the basement, view balconies of the mountains, cherry and pear trees in the garden, and a trout stream that ran through the middle of the property?
Barely worth a sniff…
And so it was that we found ourselves in St. Remy de Provence with one day left to our…so-called…house-buying trip. The rain came down in thick sheets. The sky was leaden, the wind blowing hard.
Out of desperation, we decided to take a side visit to Uzes, which had been penciled into our agenda as one of those “we can always go there if nothing better presents itself” kind of places.
And it was stunning.
The rain had driven everyone indoors and we eagerly crossed the one-way boulevard that encircled the town. We’d travelled all over the Languedoc, and found Uzes to be like no other town or village we had seen.
We darted down a deserted side street and had a beautiful building come into view, which we would later learn was Uzes’ Duchy…the oldest in France.
We were struck by how refreshingly “real” Uzes felt. All around us were regular people doing regular things. There were no tourists in view, nor any gift shops that catered to the trade. Uzes was quiet and hushed. It didn’t have to shout.
We continued our visit to Uzes, and at the edge of the town (it took only a few minutes of walking to traverse Uzes) came upon a striking building that looked, for all the world, exactly like a campanile that had been plucked from Italy and deposited here. If we didn’t know better, we would have thought we were in Umbria.
Puzzled, we walked across the boulevard and took in the pretty views from what was called the Promenade des Marroniers. A cathedral stood at the side the campanile, and we entered and found it deserted. To one side, we found a room that was stacked with paintings because there was no room to hang them, evidently.
When we returned to the village, was saw beautiful things everywhere we looked
Most noticeable were the architectural highlights of the town. Uzes, we realized, was gorgeous. We had stumbled upon a jewel.
We had lunch at a créperie off the main square, and Linda began reviewing printouts of real estate listings that had been taped to an agency’s view window afterward. She didn’t know it at the time, but she had found what she had been looking for.
A few months later, she made another visit to Uzes, and bought a home.
From the Book:
Chapter 5: Dark Clouds, Silver Linings
Uzes’ “boulevard” had no traffic on it, and its side streets seemed to be equally deserted. The town felt like a place that time had forgotten, and we crossed the road and walked down a street that suggested it might lead to the center of town, and quickly found ourselves pointing out to each other how pretty the buildings made of stone were. Every building, it seemed, was made of the same warm, honey-colored stone.
Uzes felt remarkably authentic, notably absent of the trinket shops we so often saw in the Provençe across the river. People didn’t just visit Uzes, it seemed. They lived there.
A beautiful square populated by pollarded plane trees that had fairy lights running through their branches began to appear. Water splashed loudly from a large fountain placed slightly off center, and the square was framed on all four sides by ancient arcaded homes. It was a scene so pretty that it brought us to a stop.
“Where are all the people?” Erik suddenly asked.
It was a good question. Linda and I had been so focused on the beauty around us that we’d failed to notice the near absence of anyone on the streets. The heavy rainfall of the morning might offer an explanation, but the storm had passed by over an hour ago, and squares in Europe were generally quite busy places.
Where were all the people?
“Probably eating,” Erik said, answering his own question. “I’m hungry, by the way,” he added.
“There’s a créperie in the corner that looks like it’s open,” Linda said, knowing that crépes were always a good choice for our family. Erik had loved them ever since we had spent part of a summer in Brittany.
Erik looked hard, and then located it. “Bien,” he said, venturing a word of French.
