Comme Des Gascons

With Its Pristine Medieval Villages and Preserved Churches, Armagnac Distilleries and Duck Markets, Gascony Is the Perfect Spot for One Peripatetic Couple to Finally Slow Down.

- Pilar Guzmán

“Oh là là, look at the Pyrenees!” Ramdane Touhami gasps, with one hand on the wheel of his Range Rover Sport and the other holding on to his fuzzy hotpink skullcap. The snowcapped mountain range suddenly comes into view with a biblical ray of light as we tear down an empty two-lane road near the village of Labéjan in Gascony. “Time really stopped here,” says the eccentric 42-year-old French-Moroccan designer and entrepreneur about a region whose swells of electric-green farmland and dense forests are interrupted only by thirteenth-century steeples. Here in this remote corner of southwestern France, ducks are said to outnumber humans 28 to one. It is the land of foie gras and duck confit, of ancient Armagnac distilleries and the real d’Artagnan of Dumas’s Three Musketeers. With its 2,000 hours a year of sunshine, Gascony is known as the country’s “harvest basket,” drawing chefs like the three-Michelin-starred Michel Guérard, who opened the acclaimed La Bastide here in 2011. Still overshadowed by the marquee wine areas of Bordeaux to the northwest and the Rhône Valley to the northeast, Gascony might also be France’s best-kept secret.