Mougins at last

Sometimes people who live close by are the last to visit local sights and attractions. It took a visit from a Parisian friend to finally persuade us to take a peep at Mougins, a swish commuter town with a medieval hilltop village at its centre. We'd almost been there countless times, as the hospital I attended is on the outskirts...

Our first problem was how to get there. From Antibes you can get to within almost spitting distance and then you hit the pénétrante, or approach road, to Grasse. It is like newsreels from the cold war, with Berliners forlornly gazing across the Wall towards inaccessible family and friends. We hit the wrong road, of course, and were soon hurtling along the approach road - back towards Cannes.

Several kilometers closer to the sea we came to a roundabout with a tiny sign to the vieux village. So back we went, only yards from where we had been before, but now with a hope of crossing over or under the approach road. In the event, it was under.

Once in the village, having parked our car in the immense, terraced carpark (not a place I would like to frequent in the tourist season), we headed for the historic centre. It was the usual Côte d'Azur mix of estate agents, soap and scent shops, and, worst of all, 'art' galleries (for a taste of what 'taste' really means, including the famous barfing dog, worthy of Leonardo da Vinci, try this). For some reason, they forget the initial f in art. These traditional Provençal métiers show absolutely no sign of dying out, unlike fishing, basket weaving, genuine pottery manufacture and flower cultivation, and the range of surnames is a veritable sampler of old Occitanie: Schmith, Rafferty, Zingraf.

Still, despite being tarted up, the village was still striking, even if some of the larger properties had built cyclopean walls to privatise the view over the Mediterranean, in case any plebs or tourists should get the silly idea of looking at nature instead of (f)art.