Vallée de la Loire

Bonjour

Two blog posts in two weeks!!!!! AND this one is bit lengthy so will be in TWO PARTS!! Sacré bleu!

We spent a few days in the Loire Valley – another destination ticked off the bucket list. It’s about a four hour drive so we left early on Friday morning – several hours after the UK announced 14 day isolation for those arriving from France after 4am the following day. The upshot of this was literally thousands of English holiday makers abandoned their French summer vacation plans and rushed to trains, ferry terminals and airports to get home before the deadline. We stopped for a pit stop along the way and were convinced we were in England based on the conversations around us.

Trying to squeeze Clio between English cars. British car parking at its finest.

There are chateaux everywhere in France*, but especially in the Loire Valley. This is because back in the day, Paris was taken over by the English and so the French king at the time decided to move his court to Amboise because it was pretty and the hunting was good. Next thing, his relatives and others who wanted to stay in his good books all moved there too, and the size and grandeur of the chateaux they were building became somewhat competitive. We saw some of the more famous and well preserved ones and they all have an interesting history.

*Fun fact – there are many chateaux for sale in France at surprisingly low prices. The majority of them are bought by overseas buyers. The purchase prices are reasonable but the cost of restoring and maintaining is eye watering. “Structurally renovating a château could set you back an average of €1,000 per square metre. To get a ball-park cost of the possible renovation costs, take a look at the description of the château for sale and simply add three zeroes to its total habitable square meterage“. Sometimes there are tax concessions if the chateau is classified as historically and architecturally significant and is open for public viewing.

This one is currently for sale – €568,000 or about AU$940,000. Comes with 11 bedrooms and 0.6 hectares.

Anyway – back to the Loire Valley. The first chateau we visited was Villandry – more famous for its garden than the actual building itself. It was built by the king’s finance minister after he knocked down the 12 century fortress which was originally on the site. After changing hands a few times, it was bought by Spanish Joachim Carvallo in 1906. He devoted the rest of his life, together with his very rich American wife’s inheritance, to restore the gardens and provide a place to display his extensive art collection. Villandry is currently owned and managed by their descendants.

In writing this, we just realised that neither of us have a photo of the actual chateau, but plenty of the gardens…..

Part of the Ornamental Garden on the left, water leading up to the Water Garden in the middle and part of the Vegetable Garden on the right.

This is how they plan the Vegetable Garden each season. This is ‘Villandry vegetable garden summer culture 2020″. Each colour block represents a different type of vegetable and much thought went in to the colour schemes and sizes of the plants. As well as vegetables and herbs, they also used a lot of bedding begonias along the borders to define the shapes.

Every room in the chateau had fresh flowers from the gardens or (most probably) the hot houses. The smell from these lilies in the kitchen was off the charts and the orchids were everywhere.

Chateau #1 done. Time for wine tasting and dinner. The photos below demonstrate how the French know how to plate up food. The black plate is basically a piece of fish with mashed potato and veges. On the right is vanilla ice cream with fruit. The bottom picture is cafe gourmand – coffee with a few small tasting size desserts of (this time) vanilla custard, apple dumpling and fruit salad. Of course the menu descriptions were several sentences for each dish but our French must be improving because we are not reaching for Google translate nearly as often these days.