Provides information on museums, galleries, restaurants, cafâes, shopping, and entertainment options in Barcelona.

Art/Shop/Eat Barcelona

Travel

Catlos, Brian

Bennett, Annie

Europe

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

The definitive guide to one of France''s most varied and exciting regions. The Rough Guide to Languedoc and Roussillon combines rich cultural and historical information and lively coverage of all the sights with detailed practical information - for all budgets. Special attention is given to outdoor activities, including cycling and hiking as well as boating the region''s famous inland waterways. Expert advice is given on making the most of the region''s gastronomic specialities and vineyards. Coverage is close up and critical - the guide tells you what to see, what to pass up and gives you all the inside information to make your travels in the region rich and rewarding.

The Rough Guide to Languedoc & Roussillon 2 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

Rough Guides

The guide combines rich cultural and historical information and lively coverage of all the sights with detailed practical information - for all budgets. Special attention is given to outdoor activities, including cycling, hiking and boating and expert advice is given on making the most of gastronomic specialities.

The Rough Guide to Languedoc & Roussillon

INTRODUCTION The Languedoc and Roussillon region is one of France’s best-kept secrets. While Provence and the Cote d’Azur just across the Rhone have been living it up, attracting movie stars and the masses, its less pretentious neighbour has remained in comfortable obscurity. And so much the better for those in the know: a dramatically varied landscape, two distinct, proud cultures – Occitan and Catalan, a tradition of heresy and steadfast rebellion, and age-old customs all combine to make this a region deservedly unmatched in its romantic associations, at once epitomizing and contradicting everything that is France. Now shaking off centuries of sleepy neglect, Languedoc and Roussillon is emerging as one of the most enticing parts of the country, its remote villages and little-travelled byways affording a much-needed window onto a rural culture no longer found in northern France. 
The boundaries of Languedoc have never been easy to fix. In its broadest – and original – sense, Languedoc includes the lands where the Occitan language (the langue d’Oc) was spoken in the Middle Ages, an area stretching along the Mediterranean from the foothills of the Pyrenees to the Italian Alps, and spreading north towards Savoy, through the Massif Central and west along the Atlantic coast, taking in even Bordeaux. Nowadays, for administrative purposes, it has been lumped together with its neighbour as the modern région of Languedoc-Roussillon, and trimmed down to the strip of coast running from Montpellier west to the border of Spain. But this latter, narrow definition of Languedoc is as inappropriate as the traditional one is vague. In defining Languedoc in this Guide, we’ve avoided artificial boundaries in favour of cultural and historical uniformity and the logistics of travel, so that the region covered butts up to neighbouring Provence at the Rhone, and stretches west and inland to include the medieval capital of Toulouse, as well as the lands of neighbouring Albi and Foix. Roussillon, Languedoc’s accidental partner squashed in between the eastern Pyrenees and the Corbieres hills, is also characterized by a particular linguistic heritage, derived in this case from a long history as part of the Catalan confederacy centred in Barcelona. Both regions have distinct cultures but, in addition to their border, share a common history of occupation, and of resistance and submission to the modern France of Paris and the north. 
They also share a land renowned for its isolation, and immense diversity. On the far eastern edge, the Rhone disgorges into the swampy delta of the Camargue, the majority of which, east of the Petit Rhône, falls into adjacent Provence, leaving a small portion, the ranching territory of the Petite Camargue with its abundance of bird and wildlife, to Languedoc. A coastline of nearly unbroken beach bends west from here, punctuated by ancient fishing villages and their modern resort counterparts, while inland, beyond the band of the coastal plain, the land gradually rises, from scrubby hills to the cool, wooded highlands of Haut Languedoc and the forbidding peaks of the Montagne Noir. Great rivers, the Herault, Orb and Aude, have carved their way down through the hills, leaving spectacular gorges, while vines and olive trees intersperse the rocks, giving way to a blanket of oak in the heights. West of Haut Languedoc the grain fields and vineyards extending from Toulouse to Albi are a world apart, while below it the Canal du Midi, a seventeenth-century waterway, bisects the region; south of its stately, cypress-lined banks the terrain rises again, first tentatively as the Corbieres hills and the barren Pays de Sault, then surging skyward as the snow-capped Pyrenees. As the mountains draw close the coastline transforms into a series of rocky coves, while above, solitary Mount Canigou lords it over the deeply etched valleys of Roussillon. 
The extraordinary geophysical range of Languedoc and Roussillon is matched by an historical legacy that lends the area much of its appeal. Settled as far back as any part of Europe, the region boasts evidence of our ancestors of over a half million years ago, while habitation in the Ariège valley some fifteen to thirty thousand years ago has yielded a rich and mysterious heritage of prehistoric cave art, some of the most engaging in southern Europe. As history dawned, the hill forts of Celtic tribes, or oppida, punctuated the broad Mediterranean plain – their scattered remnants are still visible today – while later Phoenician and Greek colonization on the coast paved the way for the eventual Roman expansion into the area in the second-century BC. The Romans built almost every town of importance in Languedoc today – the greatest being Nimes, Narbonne and Toulouse – and linked them by roads such as the mighty Via Domitia, which sliced through the region to link Rome with southern Spain. An outstanding array of Roman monuments is the result, including Nimes’ amphitheatre and probably the world’s most famous aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.

The Rough Guide to Languedoc & Roussillon (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

INTRODUCTION The sheer physical diversity of France would be hard to exhaust in a lifetime of visits. The landscapes range from the fretted coasts of Brittany to the limestone hills of Provence, the canyons of the Pyrenees and the half-moon bays of Corsica, from the lushly wooded valleys of the Dordogne to the glaciated peaks of the Alps. Each region looks and feels different, has its own style of architecture, its characteristic food and often its own patois or dialect. Though the French word pays is the term for a whole country, local people frequently refer to their own immediate vicinity as mon pays – my country – and to a person from another town as a foreigner. This strong sense of regional identity, often expressed in the form of active separatist movements, as in Brittany and Corsica, has persisted over centuries in the teeth of centralized administrative control from Paris. 
Perhaps the most striking feature of the French countryside is the sense of space. There are huge tracts of woodland and undeveloped land without a house in sight. Industrialization came relatively late, and the country remains very rural. Away from the main urban centres, hundreds of towns and villages have changed only slowly and organically, their old houses and streets intact, as much a part of the natural landscape as the rivers, hills and fields. 
The nation’s legacy of history and culture is so widely dispersed across the land that even if you were to confine your travelling to one particular region you would still have a powerful sense of the past without having to seek out major sights. With its wealth of local detail, France is an ideal country for dawdling; there is always something to catch the eye and gratify the senses, whether you are meandering down a lane, picnicking by a slow, green river, or sipping Pernod in a village café. There is also endless scope for all kinds of outdoor activities, from walking, canoeing and cycling to the more expensive pleasures of skiing and sailing. 
If you need more urban stimuli to activate the pleasure buds – clubs, shops, fashion, movies, music, hanging out with the beautiful and famous – then the great cities provide them in abundance. Paris, of course, is an outstanding cultural centre, with its stunning contemporary buildings and atmospheric back streets, its art and its ethnic diversity. And the great provincial cities like Lille and Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille and Nice vie with the capital and each other, like the city-states of old, for prestige in the arts, ascendancy in sport and innovation in urban transport. 
For a thousand years and more, France has been at the cutting edge of European development, and the legacy of this wealth, energy and experience is everywhere evident in the astonishing variety of things to see: from the Gothic cathedrals of the north to the Romanesque churches of the centre and west, the chateaux of the Loire, the Roman monuments of the south, the ruined castles of the English and the Cathars and the Dordogne’s prehistoric cave-paintings. If not all the legacy is so tangible – the literature, music and ideas of the 1789 Revolution, for example – much has been recuperated and illustrated in museums and galleries across the nation, from colonial history to fishing techniques, aeroplane design to textiles, migrant shepherds to manicure, battlefields and coalmines. 
Many of the museums are models of clarity and modern design. Among those that the French do best are museums devoted to local arts, crafts and customs like the Musee National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris and the Musée Dauphinois in Grenoble. But inevitably first place must go to the fabulous collections of fine art, many of which are in Paris, for the simple reason that the city has nurtured so many of the finest creative artists of the last hundred years, both French, Monet and Matisse for example, and foreign, such as Picasso and Van Gogh. 
If you are quite untroubled by a need to improve your mind in the contemplation of old stones and works of art, France is equally well endowed to satisfy the grosser appetites. The French have made a high art of daily life: eating, drinking, dressing, moving and simply being. The pleasures of the palate run from the simplest picnic of crusty baguette, ham and cheese washed down by an inexpensive red wine through what must be the most elaborate takeaway food in the world, available from practically every charcuterie; such basic regional dishes as cassoulet; the liver-destroying riches of Perigord and Burgundy cuisine; the fruits of the sea; extravagant pastries and ice-cream cakes; to the trance-inducing refinements – and prices – of the great chefs. And there are wines to match, at all prices, and not just from the renowned vineyards of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne. If you feel inadequate in the face of all this choice, never be afraid to ask advice, for most French people are true devotees, ever ready to explain the arcane mysteries to the uninitiated.

The Rough Guide to France (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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