Cipières

From our terrace, looking north, we can see the curtain walls of the town, the umbrella pines of the boulevard which runs round the port, the assorted masts and paraphernalia of the yachts in the harbour, the angled bastions of the Fort Carré, and far in the distance the inexorable rise of the hills as they struggle to gain altitude to call themselves the Alps. We look that way each morning, to see what the weather is doing, including fresh coverings of snow (in July).

Yesterday, tired of looking at this neverending spectacle from afar, we decided to go hiking in the foothills. The intended destination was Cipières, a village above the Gorges du Loup. As with almost any journey worth taking here, the first part was hell on wheels. The coastal strip must be one of the most concreted, motorised parts of Europe. An hour and a bit later, and a mere fifteen kilometers on the clock, we hit the Gorges du Loup, a dramatic cleft in the mountains, with the road precariously clinging to vertical cliffs and a torrent a vertiginous distance below. Cipières was at the end of a winding and dizzying road, largely made of small concrete beams levering off the cliff faces. Signs warning us of the dangers of rockfalls left us somewhat puzzled as to what to do if the eventuality actually arose.

From Cipières we headed up into the hills on foot, first on the GR4, and then on a local track. The aim was to see one of the many bories, or stone igloos, which still dot the countryside around here. The path, basically unstable scree, took us through a botanist's paradise, with huge clumps of thyme, savoury, origano, wild lavender and so on. As we marched through this herbiary, the plants exhaled a powerful, inebriating essence, distilled by sunshine. We filled our knapsacks with culinary abundance, whilst swatting away clouds of exotic butterflies (and the occasional, tenacious horsefly). Everywhere there were the signs of foraging by wild boar. Not animals you want to meet on a narrow path.

The landscape is carstic, weathered limestone, with extensive fields of steep scree (baous). Scratching a living from the land here (utterly parched in summer and buried in deep snow in winter) must have been a desperate business. Signs of titanic labour were everywhere, with terracing and destoning of tiny fields reaching well towards the near perpendicular summits. The borie, when we found it, was huge, with walls well over a metre thick, and an entrance which did not need you to stoop to get in. Life for the shepherd sent to pasture goats up there, at over 1000 metres altitude, must have been anguishing and lonely, like Ledda's account in Padre padrone.