About a 45-minute drive away, the gorges of Hérault are a national park and a “grand site de France.” As we drove in, it wasn’t very impressive. It’s not super hilly as you approach and once you arrive, the road runs along a river in a small gorge, which I expected would be scenic. Not so much. But fortunately, things improved.
St-Guilhem-le-Désert is a narrow little town stretching along a stream, surrounded by steep hills. As we’ve seen in many of our visits to small towns, almost everything was closed now that we’re well into autumn. The one place that was open was selling pralined nuts, made on site. We had to support the local economy, right?
After strolling up and down the main street, we headed up the hiking trail on the northern side of town.
Unfortunately, the trail was closed above this gate due to risk of falling rocks. So we turned around and took the trail up the southern side, which turned out to be a better choice. The sun was shining on the rock walls across the valley, making for great scenery, and we were in the shade as we zigzagged our way up the hillside.
Looking back, we could see the ruins of a castle far above the town. I can’t quite imagine running that far uphill to get protection from invaders.
As we reached the highest point of our hike, the overhanging layers on the hillside above us looked like it could also be a risk of falling rocks. But, happy to have stopped ascending, we kept going, despite the gale-force winds that awaited us around the corner. All those layers removed on the climb got put back on in a hurry!
Perspective is a funny thing. We felt like we were very high off the valley floor. (We were about 120m (400 ft) up.) But when we got back down and looked up, it didn’t look that far at all – we’d only gone about halfway up.
This hike was on a tiny piece of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, marked by scallop shells (real and images). We could have followed it all the way to Galicia, Spain – but that’s a wee bit too far…
Beyond Our French Adventure 