Six reasons why the Mediterranean is better in winter
It is autumn. Winter is just beyond. It’s time to go to the Mediterranean seaside. This is a preferable late-year option to skiing: you won’t break a limb, be obliged to mix with other skiers, to wear a Michelin-man outfit, go up a mountain or anywhere near snow. Conclusive already. But there are other reasons:
Heritage
Our great, good and noble British forebears invariably wintered by the Med, on the Riviera. Winter was high season through to the 1920s. Hotels closed for summers considered way too hot for fragile north European constitutions. We essentially created Cannes and Menton for our winter holiday requirements, and boosted Nice into the big league. We brought with us well-bred decadence, gardening and welcome employment opportunities for the French, as domestics.
Queen Victoria was a fan. As she lay dying at Osbourne House, she apparently wheezed: “If only I were in Nice, I’d get better.” Even – especially – if not on our last legs, the classier sort of Briton should be honouring this tradition. Join me. I’ll be the one in boater and blazer on the Promenade des Anglais.
It’s light and warm
One reason aristos headed south was for the winter light and warmth. Maybe that’s two reasons. Anyway, the sun will be low in a huge sky, spangling the sea with the sort of stunning light reported by those returning from near-death experiences. Thus are promised high-resolution times riveting for those from the vague, grey north. You’ll perhaps not be bathing - unless you’re a year-round-trunks lunatic – but might lunch outdoors on sea-bream in a shellfish sauce, with a glass of rosé to hand and, before, vast sea and sky with blues as distinct as colours on a flag.
There are no other tourists about
There’ll be a few in Nice and Cannes, of course. These are proper functioning full-time towns. But elsewhere, and especially across to the west of the Rh?ne on the Languedoc coast, yours may be the only footprints in the sand. The hugeness will prove hypnotic (but keep spiritual musings to yourself). Meanwhile, padding the tight, empty village streets behind is like moving around back-stage after the show is over.
Seaside spots reduce to their proper populations
Overwhelmed in summer by the aestival jollity of incoming folk in flip-flops, locals are suddenly all that’s left, come autumn – with their proper local concerns: fishing, shopping, repairing roofs, playing cards in the café and smoking under the No-Smoking signs.
Self-improvement, too. Not long ago, in the lagoon-side shellfish port of Mèze, I saw a poster announcing a series of winter lectures on Marxist sociology. I looked at the half-dozen fellows drinking mid-morning wine at the nearby bar – they’d perhaps 17 teeth between them – and wondered how Hegel might go in Heysham.
All this is true even in places like St Tropez where real Tropeziens recapture their village from the global forces of glamour to reveal it as a comely little Mediterranean settlement, the result of hard lives, maritime commerce and considerable military distinction. Thus, along the coast, one gets a feel for the Med in its fulness, when it was a source of civilisation, of work and of menace rather than a leisure facility. People – café-owners, restaurateurs, fishwives – will, though, be delighted to see you as they’ve not seen anyone from outside all week. They’ll have ample time to explain where Didier Deschamps is going wrong and what rouille-de-seiche might be. Later, the blokes in the bar will move on to dialectical materialism.
Museums remain open and are crush-free
I’m referring, initially, to the great galleries of the Riviera: Matisse and Chagall in Nice, Leger in Biot, Picasso in the chateau at Antibes and (with War & Peace panels) the chapel in Vallauris. But also the Musée de l’Ephèbe in the friskier surrounds of the Cap-d’Agde. Winter shrivels the activity of Europe’s biggest naturist camp nearby, but there’s sublime male nudity in the museum where a classical bronze – dug by marine archaeologists from the Hérault estuary – is said to be of Alexander the Great. Whoever he is, he’s beautiful, soft-featured and evidently merciless.
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