absorbable product, taking care not to alter its health-giving properties in the process. When applied to the body, this rich source of potassium, magnesium, amino acids and iodine helps establish nervous and muscular equilibrium – so the benefits are far from merely cosmetic. One of the most popular body therapies uses a masque of algae, marine mud and seaweed. After being first softened with warm seawater and coarse salt grains, the skin is lavished in the mixture and wrapped in clingfilm. After being left to lie under a heated blanket, the client is cleansed in a cool marine shower before being gently massaged and moisturized. Just as relaxing are Brittany’s expansive scenic views that encapsulate it’s craggy, aquatic landscape rich in marine birds and wildlife.
A glorious sunset in the Finistère region of Brittany.
021 NORMANDY
CONTACT Claude Monet Foundation Tel: +33 2 32 51 28 21 Fax: +33 2 32 51 54 18 Email: [email protected] www.fondation-monet.com
To journey through Claude Monet’s dazzling, bloom-filled gardens at Giverny is to understand his passion for heart-stirringly vivid colour. For this living, growing, floral canvas boasts an extraordinary combination of hues: a trademark of this great initiator of the evocative Impressionist style of painting. Weeping willows trail over delicate wooden bridges set amidst a blaze of bold violet-blues tempered by green lilies and golden flecks. Soft cherry pinks, mellow mauves and inky purples morph into pewter shadows while crimson poppies tumble across the warm amber hayfields that surround the gardens. Depicting love and the natural world, Monet was inspired by the sensual splashes of colour that enveloped him, from the joyous sunshine of summer and autumn’s fallen leaves to the bleakness and wonderment of winter. Life, love and romance were his favourite themes. Like his oils, plants were Monet’s artistic tools of the trade with the bare soil in his gardens at Giverny his canvas. Mixing his colours became a love-fuelled obsession that transcended art: ‘More than anything else, I must have flowers, always, always...’, he wrote.
Monet’s adoration of colour is evident throughout his five-acre garden. Using vibrant shrubs for year-round colour and texture, he experimented with bulbs, perennials and annuals from all over the world. Monet loved the hazy, shimmering effect of colour and created numerous series of flower-stuffed geometric beds and rose-covered arches. By selecting plants that swayed and fluttered in the breeze, Monet created movement, evident in a rippling tide of Oriental poppies that punctuate a sea of cosmos. A sophisticated palette daubed with blue, pink, yellow, red, green and silver owed its beauty to bearded irises, daisies, gladioli, hollyhocks, pansies, black violas, nasturtiums, cleome, phlox, forget-me-nots, bluebells, wallflowers, pinks, sage and sunflowers. Only black had no place in his garden, or his art.
Monet’s brushwork shows determination and rigorous observation, much like that of Edouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s proved a guiding influence to Impressionists. As a means of capturing the delicate colours he so cherished, Monet crafted beautiful injections of light and contrast in his canvasses, conveying the subtle essence of nature in the style of truly romantic art. He also demonstrated pure luminosity in his 19th-century gardens, dividing the planted areas into a flower-filled Clos Normand garden and a Japaneseinspired water garden. Since Monet’s death in 1926, these gardens have been open to the public. Today over half a million visitors a years from all over the world pay homage to Monet’s irrepressible affection for love, life, nature – and colour.
A kaleidescope of colours at Monet’s gardens at Giverny.
022 PAU
CONTACT Aquitaine Montgolfières Tel: +33 5 59 66 59 22 / +33 6 80 34 30 34 Email: [email protected] www.aquitaine-montgolfieres.fr
Expect to pay around 300 euros for a romantic airborne soirée-for-two, with Champagne and a hand-tied floral bouquet available on request for an extra special touch.
Hot air ballooning enjoys a storied tradition in The Pyrenees, offering some of Europe’s finest panoramas against a magnificent backdrop of jagged mountains. Sweeping plateaux, undulating countryside, high bluffs and ragged spits boast extraordinary flora and fauna. Innumerable and large rocky protrusions run parallel to the spiny ridges while the rolling folds of the landscape form crumbled meadows in the flower-scattered foothills beneath. Light gusts offer the perfect propulsion for balloon travel, aiding Jesus Fernandez Duro to make the first balloon-powered crossing of the Pyrénées in 1906. Today, the grounds of the beautiful, vine-cloaked 15thcentury Cistercian Abbaye de l’Escaladieu serves as a romantic launch point for balloon explorations of the mountains, allowing a scenic ascent over the confluence of the Luz and Aroos Rivers near the castle of Mauvezin. Getting off the ground requires a pilot to connect propane tanks to the burners. Once the valve is switched on, a flame jettisons into the silken envelope as it slowly inflates to a swell. Ropes untied, a bumpy take-off preludes a weightless rise skyward, accompanied by a gaseous roar as the balloon enters its timeless, floating state. High above the ancient pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostela, the romance of a weightless world unfolds as do the gasp-inducing views.
Balloon travel provides the ultimate in joyously haphazard romantic journeying, embodying an exotic, unsystematic mode of exploration driven by a frisky breeze. Although a skilled pilot can influence the height of a hot-air balloon within centimetres, it is the wind that dictates direction. Few travel plans are as romantically fickle as those that rely on the whim of Mother Nature – and it is this liberating casting of fate that forms the bedrock of ballooning’s romantic appeal. Skim across wooded Alpine thickets and wind-chiselled limestone crags at a leisurely 25 kph (16 mph). Cross boulder-strewn streams, rustic mountain villages, ancient Ibex trails and stone ledges covered in creeping scrub. When it is time to swap a cloudy puffball for solid ground, brace yourself for a jolt as you return to earth in a tufted meadow.
Up, up and away: enjoy a romantic airbourne cruise over the French countryside.
023 RIQUEWIHR
CONTACTS Régional du Tourism d’Alsace Tel: +33 3 88 25 01 66 Fax: +33 3 88 52 17 06 Email: [email protected] www.tourisme-alsace.com
Riquewihr’s medieval splendour draws involuntary gasps from first-time visitors as they approach on the gloriously vine-hemmed Rue de Vin. Nestled in a small valley in the foothills of the blue-green Vosges Mountains, Riquewihr remains an object of centuries-old wonderment, its narrow, cobbled streets brimming with charming buildings in a kaleidoscopic array of vivid hues. Unchanged since the Middle Ages, the half-timbered architecture has been painstakingly and sensitively preserved – and so, too, has the culture. Riquewihr’s fusion of Gallic-Germanic traditions continues to dominate local heritage, from language to food and festivals, with every aspect of daily life revolving around the grape.
To discover France’s most romantic town is to stroll its narrow alleys and uneven streets amidst a blaze of colour that positively glows from the building facades, from pale pink and faded
