French Perfection

Nigel Donnelly and Jenny Owen take an off-season tour of the place the French flock to for their holidays.

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The word ‘authentic’ is one whose meaning has been somewhat hijacked. Its simple meaning was that something is real, rather than fake. Increasingly, however, authenticity is now considered a measure of quality or good taste.

Today, it is not enough simply to eat pasta to get a flavour of Italian life, for example. You need fresh pasta, but even that is a bit half-hearted. Ideally, you need to make pasta using special flour and posh olive oil. After all, you wouldn’t catch an Italian eating pasta that wasn’t authentic, so why would you?

Authenticity in travel follows a similar pattern. The holiday equivalent of posh pasta is going where the locals go. If a destination delights the locals enough for them to hang their annual two-week hiatus on, there is no higher accolade. It’s a good indicator that it is where you should be going, too.

For many French tourists, the destination de jour is a sandy, low-lying island anchored off the mid-Atlantic coast. The Île de Ré has a population of around 20,000, but in holiday season that swells to 200,000. Reasoning that 180,000 French holiday makers could not be wrong, we set course.

Tour de Ré

A few things about the island strike you at first glance. As you drive over the magnificent bridge from the mainland, the lack of elevation is obvious. The island is pancake-flat. You’ll also notice that there are bikes everywhere, their proliferation no doubt helped by the aforementioned lack of hills. As well as bikes, there are lots of places to park them, plus paths and places to rent them from, too.