I live with my partner and our son in the Haute-Loire department of France. This is my brief take on things, three years in.
Haute-Loire doesn’t offer itself up easily. There’s no lavender-scented brand campaign or glossy welcome sign. It’s neither flat nor textbook chic. This is a place where people talk about the weather like it’s family, and family like it’s the weather. Stories unfold on basalt and travel with the wind.
We’re in the center of France, though not exactly central, and never the center of attention. The Loire and Allier rivers run the length of it, carving steep banks and cool pools with granite patience. Fishermen are happy here, as are elderly couples in camping cars escaping the heat from the south.
This is middle mountain country—soft peaks and volcanic spines, sucs, necks, and dykes—the kind of geology that throws up plateaus and stone towers without warning. Medieval fortresses still cling to cliffs, keeping watch, as they always have. Pilgrims pass through Le Puy-en-Velay on the Compostella looking for God, or at least a decent sandwich.
Our winters are long, frigid, and far from poetic. Roads ice over, hills turn black, conversations get shorter, but summer brings the pastures to life. Wildflowers and mushrooms, barbecue smoke and cousins visiting from Lyon, everyone comes out squinting.
We have scenic routes, bells at noon, and remote villages with one bar, one chapel, and the same last name on every mailbox. We have hamlets with no city water and five kinds of cherry trees. We have the type of silence that either troubles you or lets you breathe again.
We have fields of cows lying in the shade for hours, enormous bales of hay, and birds aplenty—screeching jays, goldcrests, cuckoos, blue tits, crested tits, buzzards that hustle as if they’re auditioning for a Western.
Volcanoes shaped this land long ago, and the land shapes its people: a patchwork of farmers, merchants, nurses, artisans, those who never left, those who came to be left alone (and maybe grow some potatoes).
The sky is big, the world is small—prejudice and kindness, suspicion and generosity, all braided together like last year’s garlic.
Haute-Loire is rugged and raw, and beautiful in ways that don’t always photograph well. It is a place that won’t request the spotlight, and wouldn’t care even if it got it.
You might not fall in love, but if you stay long enough, you’ll stop needing to. Haute-Loire gets into your bones.
Come for a visit!
—Lex
You make me want to live there.
I can totally picture and feel everything, because of the way you write