Foreign Perspectives

Most people think of the south of France as purely a Summer holiday destination but in reality it’s pretty much an all year round one.The July/August period is probably the very worst time to go to the south on holiday. Temperatures are almost always above 30c and frequently clear 40 which makes for a very exhausting time for many activities. In fact, neither walkers nor cyclists attempt to do anything from about mid-July to the end of August.

Even aside from the heat, you’ll find that the traffic is heavier than the roads are geared up for. We’ve given up trying to get down to some of the beach resorts over most of the Summer as we found that we were sitting an hour or more in traffic and then found that we couldn’t park anywhere when we did get to the resort as there’s so little public transport everyone ends up going in their car. On some peak days, even the motorway grinds to a halt as we reported in August.

If you want the heat it’s still there just outside that peak period and pretty much anytime from April to October is t-shirt weather here most of the time. Aside from Easter and during the grape harvest in September the traffic is very light and you’ll find it relatively easy to get accommodation booked too.

The Autumn is a little peculiar here. Due to the heat in the Summer, most places end up looking rather burnt and the grass only starts to grow again in September. That makes for quite an odd time colour-wise. After the grape harvest in late August/early September the vines start to adopt the normal Autumn colours but at the same time pretty much everything else is starting to grow after the weather cools down a little. This stretches out the Autumn period right into January.

Although the cold season runs from around mid January through to the end of February, calling it the “cold season” is quite misleading as many of those days are t-shirt weather. Unlike in more northern areas of Europe, when it’s sunny here, it’s warm regardless of the time of year. Where you need to be careful is with the altitude as even a few hundred metres can mean the difference between warm (hot even) and very cold. For instance, here at Mas Camps we have had one day of snow in the time that we’ve been here yet just 30 minutes or so to the west is the village of St Paul which generally gets proper Winter weather from around January to March. The boundary is very marked and you can find the western edge of the village in snow whilst the eastern edge is in t-shirt weather.

Anyway, why not think of a short break in the south of France right now to escape the cold and storms in the UK?

This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.

One Response to “When to book a holiday in the south of France”