My opportunistic attitude towards visiting World Heritage sites was on full display on our last day in France. The town of Poissy is situated roughly half-way between Giverny and Paris, so on the way back to the capital after having thoroughly enjoyed Monet Gardens, we made a brief detour to…
Even if you are not an art enthusiast, you probably have knowledge of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series – and may have chanced upon some of them in various art museums around the world. A real Impressionist buff has to find their way at least once to the house and…
One of my favorite movie quotes comes from Woody Allen’s ode to the French capital: That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me. Which is a bit ironic, because as much as we love Paris, we happen…
As we are leaving Dordogne, let’s take a look at a small selection of photographs that did not have enough collective mass to support a featured essay. Actually, I might be doing Domain de Monrecour an injustice by saying that. This fantastic hotel is anchored by an eye-catching landmark of…
There are 10 Les Plus Beaux Villages de France in Dordogne, more than in any other French department. We have already seen 9. The persistent drizzle that accompanied our stop in Brantôme at the start of our last day in Dordogne kept telling us to wrap it up and drive…
The historical province of Périgord, which roughly corresponds to the modern Dordogne department, is informally divided into 4 “colors”. Our base was in the southeastern Black Périgord, where the flow of the Dordogne river is the most picturesque, and the places like Sarlat, Beynac, La Roque-Gageac, Belvès, and others are…
Castelnaud-la-Chapelle is practically a clone of Beynac-et-Cazenac – a riverside village running up the steep hill with an imposing castle as the crown. In fact, the château is said to have been erected specifically for the purposes of rivaling Château de Beynac. The village holds membership in the Prettiest Villages…
Once you’ve been to a certain number of castles, you begin to realize that aside from architectural grandiosity the ones that leave the most lasting impression are those that look livable. No matter the historical significance or the commanding position, barren walls and a sense of abandonment will render any…
Belvès is the largest of all Les Plus Beaux Villages de France in Dordogne, counting nearly 1,500 residents. We started hitting the point of diminishing returns when we visited here, as the village would surely impressed us more if we had not seen close to a dozen other places on…
Périgueux is the capital of Dordogne and of the historic province that preceded it, Périgord. It is by some distance the largest town in the region, and out appreciation of it suffered for that. The central part of Périgueux – historically called Puy-St-Front district – is attractive enough, but the…
A year ago, on a day-trip from Costa Brava, I stopped by a couple of interesting churches in order to add Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France to my collection of visited World Heritage sites. One of the biggest serial sites on the list, this property includes 78 different…
Our next entrant on the list of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France was Limeuil, which occupies strategic heights at the juncture of Dordogne and Vézère rivers. The best view of the village is from the bridge over Dordogne. Limestone deposits and silt give Vézère waters their yellow color, while…
Monpazier was probably our favorite village of all that we visited in Dordogne. There is something about a neat bastide (a fortified village) that we find especially attractive. They are always colorful and pleasing to the eye, even under the rainy skies. The grid plan of the bastide means that there…
The quirks of family vacation planning this year conspired to put two amazing trips within a short interval of each other. Less than 4 weeks after returning from France, we went to tour Greece. Going to the country that we have never been to before, we tried to balance our…
It is probably obvious to anyone by now that our Dordogne itinerary was heavily influenced by the list of the Prettiest Villages in France. Dordogne department has 10 of them, the most of all departments in the country. I admittedly subscribe to the notion that existence of a formal recognition…
In between exploring prehistoric caves, we made a lunchtime stop in Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère, another of the Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. The little village has about the same population as La Roque-Gageac, but its more “huddled together” topology makes it feel smaller. Its highlights are the 12th-century Romanesque church, a…
River Vézère is a tributary of the Dordogne. In the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, a large number of caves with well-preserved prehistoric art have been discovered in the Vézère Valley, which lays basis for its sometime claim as “the cradle of the European civilization”.…
Domme is the quintessential hilltop village, sitting 250 meters above the river Dordogne. Its elevation gives it a sometime moniker of the Acropolis of Périgord (the latter being the natural region roughly corresponding to the present Dordogne department, so the two names can be almost used interchangeably). A bigger village…
We have already had glimpses of La Roque-Gageac in a couple of recent posts. The small village nestling under imposing rocks along the bank of Dordogne river has got to be considered picturesque even by the elevated standards of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. Here is another look at…
Château de Marqueyssac is likely part of the quintet that gives “the valley of five castles” its moniker – it has a commanding position on top of a hill overlooking the river Dordogne. But the castle itself is not the main event on its own grounds. In fact, almost no…