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.
“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.
Denne historien er fra March 2017-utgaven av Condé Nast Traveler.
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Denne historien er fra March 2017-utgaven av Condé Nast Traveler.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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The Slow Road - Rather than rush from Tokyo to Kyoto by train, as most visitors to Japan do, Tom Vanderbilt chose to bike - coasting down country roads, spying snow monkeys, and refueling with hearty bowls of soba
Rather than rush from Tokyo to Kyoto by train, as most visitors to Japan do, Tom Vanderbilt chose to bike - coasting down country roads, spying snow monkeys, and refueling with hearty bowls of soba. At the peak of the day's heat, I pulled into the tiny hamlet of Hirase, in Japan's Gifu Prefecture. I'd just climbed a twisting, waterfall-lined road several thousand feet through Hakusan National Park before descending into the shimmering fantasy landscape of Shirakawa-go, an almost Tolkien-esque village (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) comprising centuries-old farmhouses with peaked thatch roofs.
SHAILENE WOODLEY on FIJI
I was in Suva, the capital of Fiji, making a film, and our crew took over half of the Grand Pacific Hotel.
easy does it
Beyond the bubble of Queenstown, New Zealand's majestic Otago region offers the kinds of adventures you can truly appreciate only by slowing down
gather round
The secret ingredient in Philadelphia's lauded food scene? The empathy of the locals behind it
SANDS OF TIME
Sculpted by millennia, Chad is a place of ancient geology and epic grandeur. Aminatta Forna finds her place in it all
THE PAST IS PRESENT
Beguilingly complex Istanbul has done a lot of soul-searching in recent years. Lale Arikoglu digs into the city's modern identity - while tracing the roots of her own
Creation Story
Modern-day craftspeople are bringing back traditional Arabian arts in Jeddah's Old Town of Al-Balad
Continental Drift
For her first trip to Africa, aboard an HX Hurtigruten cruise ship, Sarah Greaves Gabbadon confronts her assumptions about what a homeland means
On the Rise
With new hotels, climbing routes, and biking trails, Colorado's low-key, high-elevation Western Slope is ripe for adventure
Antiques Road Show
After buying a second home, in France, the designer Claire Vivier called up fellow designer Kate Berry to go on the ultimate shopping spree