Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and the Parc Ornithologique du Pont de Gau, Camargue

Wednesday 1st and Thursday 2nd October 2025

Today, we headed for the coast. Our first look at the Mediterranean on this trip.

Wednesday – Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer:

After arriving at the park-up, just next to the beach, we cycled through to the town.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is a very pleasant town with a harbour, situated on the Rhone delta. It is surrounded by inland waterways and lakes, many of them salt-water. Although there is an active fishing industry, it is clear that the main commercial activity is tourism.

Like other towns in this area of France, there is a strong bullfighting tradition. It has a bullring and there are many art installations sited around.

The town centre is full of eating establishments and souvenir shops. We enjoyed a very pleasant lunch in the warm sunshine, helped down with a glass of beer.

This is an old town, despite appearances and the first written mentions of it, are in the 4th century. The church was built from the 9th to the 12th centuries as a refuge and fortress. And crikey it shows. It is massively built and unique in design. Inside it is on 3 levels with a shrine underneath a raised chancel.

We later enjoyed the sunset near to the park-up, on the beach. Sea defences have been used to great effect here, creating many breakwaters with lovely sandy coves between them. As the sun set, we looked across from one breakwater to the next:

Thursday – Parc Ornithologique du Pont de Gau:

We left the park-up early to ensure we could park near to the ornithological park, around 5 Km away. We had passed this on our way down on Wednesday and there had been no room.

The park makes good use of the wetland area with many shallow lakes and observation hides. The main attraction are the wild flamingoes, who are present in their thousands, though there are many other birds to be seen here.

We walked around the full perimeter of the site and enjoyed a bit of “twitching”. After 4 hours or so exploring the park, we moved on, heading east.

We planned to stay near Salon-de-Provence, around an hour and a half away, but having got close, decided on plan B and make more progress, heading for the next likely location, at Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, another hour or so away. When we got near to this second destination, we discovered the road had been closed and we got hopelessly lost following the diversion signs. Giving up, we moved on to plan C, another aire at Jouques, another 40 minutes further on. On arrival there, we discovered that as the town was holding a fair, the camping-car site had been completely taken over by the fairground workers, forcing us on to plan D. We identified another site, a further 35 minutes or so away, at Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, an automatic aire which was fine and as we were by this time, quite tired, we could have slept on a clothes-line.

That is it for today. TTFN and see-u-later.