Inter Hotel, Montpellier, France, 24th June 1993
I bought a 31f ticket for the 11.15 to Aigues-Mortes and boarded the bus at the Gare Routier. We left with a full load, out past the Hotel de Ville and the creamy 1990’s Neoclassicism of Antigone and into the suburbs – a hypermarket, white horses in a scrubby field, an egret, a camp site. Then the airport and views east across the glittering Etang de l’Or.
We reached the Mediterranean at Caron-Plage and turned east along the spit of land that separates the Etang from the Gulf d’Aigues-Mortes. It’s developed with a rash of villas and apartments all along to Petit Travers, where they give way to sand dunes and a busy beach – flags, sails, umbrellas and pedalos. In belated respect for the environment some of the dunes were fenced off, protected from the defined paths through them. Beyond Grand Travers, La Grande-Motte, a popular seaside resort and port built in the 1960s and 1970s, dominated the horizon: grandiose homogeneous pyramidal architecture playing with bright sun and deep shade. Lawns, an unnatural green for the south of France showed a profligate use of water; the stone pines and flashes of bright red bougainvillea and pink tamarisk looked more in harmony with the climate. A forest of masts and rank on rank of expensive white hulls filled the marina.
We turned south towards Le Grau-du-Roi, Village de Vacances, into a land of lagoons and mashes, of flamingos, Camargue horses and black bulls rendered spectral mirages in the heat haze. A land of salt too, gleaming white dunes produced by Salins du Midi, a company founded in Aigues-Mortes in 1856 (the industry dates back centuries). The final leg followed a reed-fringed canal to the historic town – the boarding and alighting along the way had left only three of us on the bus.
I entered the old town through the Porte de la Gardette and ate a picnic lunch in the shade to the sound of a tinkling of a fountain and screaming swifts.
Though Aigues-Mortes now sprawls around the junction of the Canal du Rhône à Sète and the Chenal Maritime, the medieval walls surrounding the old city old are well preserved and define it as a separate entity. The name Aigues-Mortes was used in 1248 in the Latinized form Aquae Mortuae, which means “dead water”, or “stagnant water”, from the marshes and ponds that surround the original village, which had no potable water.
Lunch finished, I walked the 1.65 km round the severely rectangular walls. The sun was high, the walls were low and there was no escape from the heat except to plunge into the deep dark cool shade of the interior one of the ten towers, five of them gates that mark the perimeter. The defensive curtain is a testimony to Western European military architecture in the marshlands during the 13th and 14th centuries. Semi-detached at one corner, the Tower of Constance was built in 1242-54 by Saint-Louis (Louis IX). Its bells are housed in a traditional iron Provençal clochettes du Seigneur. Swifts scudded past at eye level; gulls floated by languidly. The walls make a very precise definition between inside and outside
Looking outward, the flat lands of the Camargue run away into a hazy distance across dry fields, barely green except for the vines, and blue-green lagoons, their surface rippled by the breeze. White mountains of salt shimmered to the south and real mountains, Lozere, Ventoux, took on the distant blue of aerial perspective.
Inside the grid of straight streets were cast in shade or baked in a hard glare. The roofs were a sea of mottled and dappled sea of red, pink and orange rolled tiles. The gothic Notre Dame des Sablons probably predates the building of the walls, a simple bell-gable housing three bells crowns the facade.
I had hoped to discover Aigues-Mortes as a quiet, romantic, perhaps other worldly haven on the edge of the wild Camargue. I found somewhere that has become no more than another tourist trap, a sort of flat Roqamadour or Clovelly. The main streets and the Saint-Louis Square, are all cafes, souvenir shops and expensive boutiques. Where do locals shop? A little three-carriage tourist train circled the walls. Is a couple of kilometres too far to walk? It’s a series of picture-postcard snaps, a coke, a coffee, an ice cream and away.
Ironically, that little train trundling round the walls, the empty Camargue stretching into the distance, adds to the slightly surreal feeling that hangs over Aigues-Mortes, this strange box of a fort that seems to have been conjured out of the marshes. It is the place the king’s daughter, Alatiel, was shipwrecked in her false explanation of her four-year absence before demurely becoming betrothed to the King of Algarve in The Decameron, Second Day, Seventh Story.