Wild At Heart

Arles, a city of elegant architecture and winningly relaxed cuisine, is the genteel gateway to the Camargue, a rugged region known for its rice fields, salt marshes and similarly standout food. ALEXANDER LOBRANO is bewitched by les deux.

- Alexander Lobrano

Viewed from a mullioned window at the Musée Réattu, the Rhône river swells into a fecund green bend behind the stone dyke that shelters Arles. These eddying waters tell a lot about the appetites of this southern French city and the surrounding Camargue region, even before you sit down to your first meal here. Nearing the end of an 812-kilometre journey from its glacial source in the Swiss Alps, the river is as rich in nutrients as a good soup, and this explains the primal fertility of the nearby farms, orchards and pastures that have fed the ancient city for centuries.

The presence of this powerful river also explains why the Romans lavishly rebuilt the post, founded by the Phoenicians in the 6th century BC, into one of their best-loved cities. As perhaps antiquity’s most astute and assiduous geographers, they prized the town as the optimum trans-shipping point between the Mediterranean and the Rhône Valley (the Rhône was then navigable from the sea to Arles).

Because they were famously epicurean, they loved this area for reasons more sybaritic than strategic. The region’s remarkable larder includes some of the world’s best olive oil, excellent wines, lamb from the plains of Le Grau-du-Roi, thumbnail-sized clams called tellines, dug from the sandbanks of the Camargue marshes, fish from both the sea and the river, and a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables almost all year round.