Villefranche-de-Conflent, and Le Petit Train Jaune

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Internet has been intermittent; this is the first of three pieces I'm posting this evening.


Monday, July 26, 2010


Villefranche-de-Conflent, and Le Petit Train Jaune

Leaving the Grotte de Niaux, we headed east, through a section of the Pyrenees. The road was good but windy, many switchbacks and a lot of gear-changing. John wasn’t feeling well, so I did most of the driving. We stopped in Ax-en-Thermes for lunch, and I dangled my feet in a thermal pool that was built in the 13th century. We picked up a baguette and some emmental cheese, and carried on. John snoozed while the road took us parallel to the border with Spain, through village after picturesque village—one seemed to be vertical, clinging to the mountainside, the front door of one building on the level of the roof of the next one down. We wound our way down into the Tet valley, and into Villefranche-de-conflent. We easily found our B&B, a huge nineteenth-century house on the river, between the town and the train station. We were shown to a beautiful, airy room, and John went to sleep.

I walked into Villefranche, a well-preserved medieval walled town, through the bastides and into . . . touristville. Cheap souvenir stalls, mediocre ice-cream stands, crowds of people just shopping, and a big band playing mariachi music (!) in the town square. Such a disappointment. You just can’t know, ahead of time, which town will have found the right balance of maintaining authenticity while catering to visitors, and which will be a complete disaster. I chose to stay in Villefranche mainly because it is the terminus for the Petit Train Jaune (the Little Yellow Train), but also because it’s a well-preserved bastide town. Sometimes you win, sometimes not. We have had Mirepoix, and now we’ve had Villefranche. There will be more of each to come, no doubt.

We ended up just having our bread and cheese, and the rest of the rosé from Avignon, for dinner in our room, and going to bed early. We had to be up early to ride the…



Petit Train Jaune


This regional train serves the mountain villages; its route winds high into the Pyrenees, pretty much along the route we drove to get here. It has become a tourist attraction now, with each village stop part of a chain of ecological parks. You can get off where you want, take a hike or ride a horse, have a picnic, then catch the train back down. At our B&B host’s suggestion, we rode about half way up, to Mont Louis, which is another Vauban town like Villefranche. (Vauban was a planner/architect in [I think—have to look it up] the nineteenth century who took on the restoration and renovation of dozens of old bastide towns throughout France. Without him, most of these would be in crumbling ruins.)

The ride up to Mont Louis was a disappointment. Our train was a new one, with closed and air-conditioned cars. At a stop on the way up, an old version of the train came into the stations, with a couple of open carriages and other cars with people hanging out the windows. There was a collective groan from our train: THAT was the train we wanted to be on. We did share the car with a three-generation family who was having a blast on the trip. I love the French for their exuberance, their expressiveness. The trip would have been a bore without this family along.

Mont Louis was a nice stop. We walked fifteen minutes to the town itself. It was not very developed for tourists, for which I was grateful after the madhouse that was Villefranche. We had lunch at a Creperie (John had a galette—the savoury version of a crepe—with cheese and ham, and I had a salad, as has become usual), walked to the walls for the view, then went back to catch the train back down into the valley.

This time, our train was the old type. I had wanted to ride in the open carriage, but it was quite chilly in the mountains, so we rode inside, which was fine. I hung out the window most of the way, along with everyone else on the train, taking photos and movies. I was ecstatic.

We pulled into the station at 3:30, picked up our car at the B&B, and headed down the road to Collioure.







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