Foreign Perspectives

Obviously the bulk of those are in the Summer but you often get a sunny day in the middle of February. The difference from more northerly countries is that when it’s sunny here, it’s warm. So, even in February you can often get days when it’s t-shirt weather and I normally expect to be wearing shorts from April to October.

Oddly though the overall pattern of weather here is very similar to Northern Ireland. As you may know, for technical reasons, we watch BBC for the news and, of course, usually catch the weather forecast too. Now, you’d think that it would be very confusing to watch the NI weather forecast whilst living in the south of France but in practice it isn’t usually. You need to add around 10 degrees to the temperature from April to October and, if it’s cloudy, take off perhaps 10 degrees in February but, otherwise the weather is broadly similar.

How come? Well, we’re in a valley surrounded by mountains with the Pyrenees about an hour to the west and the Med about 30 minutes to the east so the overall geography is quite similar to that of Belfast which is in a valley surrounded by mountains (OK, big hills) and close to the sea.

Where you do get a significant difference is in places more than about an hours drive from the sea. Friends of ours who live near Mirepoix get quite serious Winter weather from around November to March for instance. In fact, that distance from the coast is one aspect that fells many a brit moving here. They assume that moving south means moving into warmer weather. It does, but only in the Summer and even then if you’re well inland you can expect very hot Summer weather but equally you can also expect very cold Winters too. We recently had one Welsh couple staying who were looking around here and around Mirepoix for a house to retire to but were obviously just assuming that being so far south, it wouldn’t really matter exactly where they chose to live as far as the weather went.