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After two years in Barjac, we realise that we are becoming quite attached to it. Both to the town and to the region. That’s how long it takes to know whether you like a place or not. And little by little, we are learning to express that attachment!

To begin with, there are the friends we have made here and who have become dear to us. Some of them are French (“locals”, local residents and owners of shops, restaurants and other businesses here), but some are also Dutch, Belgian, English and Swiss who, like us, have come to live here. Unlike in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, where we tended to avoid contact with other Dutch people rather than seek it out, here we actually enjoy getting to know former compatriots, of the kind we would sooner or later have become friends with had they lived in Amsterdam too. A dozen of them are now part of our immediate circle of friends: Cees and Dorien from Nîmes, on whose advice we settled in this region, and Roos and Paul (the latter has sadly since passed away), from whom we were able to rent the house in Barjac, but also Bernard (a fellow countryman AND one of the local GPs!) and his wife Clara, Max (a retired police officer) and Rosalien, Femke (a former colleague of Peter’s cousin Dave) and her boyfriend Ruben, just to mention a few. Each and every one of these people is a reason not to move away.

Then there is the entertainment and amusement of Barjac. Although it is a small town, there is plenty of ‘bustle’ for much of the year, sometimes even a little too much (when the biannual antique market takes place, for example, or during the holiday season in July and August; during those periods, we’d settle for ‘a little less…’). There are ten restaurants in the centre (all within walking distance), most of which are open at least six months of the year, some even all year round. There are also a few coffee terraces and a real “café”. And there are dozens of places to eat in the immediate vicinity. So there’s plenty to do!

Barjac is very special in terms of landscape and climate: if you drive ten minutes in any of the four directions, you will find yourself in a landscape that is completely different from the other three directions! In a very short time, you can swap the Gorges de l’Ardèche for the mountains of the Cévennes or the scrubland plains of the ‘Carrigues’, and also leave the lowlands and drive to the peaks of Mont-Bouquet, or follow the ‘défilé’ of the Ardèche, or cross one of the countless ‘ponts submersibles’, the bridges that sometimes disappear completely under water. And on top of all that, Barjac is located WITHIN the famous crescent-shaped area where a Mediterranean climate prevails, but OUTSIDE the main flow of the Mistral and the Tramontane, the two prevailing winds.

In terms of our “base”, we have taken a slight step backwards compared to Nîmes: that city is located right on the A9 and A54 motorways (towards Spain and Italy) and close to the A7, A-8 and A-75 (to Lyon, Nice and Clermont-Ferrand), making it easy to reach distant destinations; from Barjac it always takes at least an hour of “winding” before you reach a motorway. There are few traffic jams, but still…

IFrom our house, the village – or town, as they say here – is within walking distance: it takes ten minutes to walk to the restaurants, terraces, market square and town hall. It’s a bit of a climb, but that’s good for our condition, isn’t it? Anyway, Peter and I cover that distance at least once a day, sometimes two or three times.

A final, recent reason not to leave Barjac behind is the fact that the town has had its own GP again since a few weeks now! In the increasing “healthcare desert” that France is becoming (just like the Netherlands, we understand), it is a relief to have a local GP on hand. Admittedly, ‘Dr Bernard’ helped us out in a pleasant and very professional manner, but we sometimes found it difficult to have to call on someone we saw more as a friend than a GP, even though he himself never wanted to hear about any objections.

In short: five good reasons to try to stay here!

…. we live, in fact. Between two rivers, which often contain hardly any water but can also become raging and all-destroying torrents, when an excessive amount of rain has fallen in the Cevennes. Like in March 2024, when six people died in the Gard alone, after a shower with as much rain as is normal in an entire month, with both rivers rising five or six metres higher than in summer.

But the varied landscape is breathtaking: sometimes one drives through lovely valleys, five minutes later along a spectacular rocky gorge or on a road stuck to the mountainside and full of tunnels, and still a little later one descends from the plateau to the river valley with dozens of hairpin bends. Medieval villages where houses almost blend together and streets are too narrow for cars. Mountain peaks where daredevils plunge into the abyss hanging from paragliders. And above all, lots of restaurants, bistros, terraces and markets. We live in a tourist area. Wait and see how it is in summer….

…. is NOT so warm that you could be sitting in the garden naked in January or February. At night, the temperature regularly drops below zero, and during the day it varies between 5 and 20 degrees. The difference is the SUN: when it shines, you can walk around in your T-shirt, but when it is cloudy or even raining, you need a thick jumper, a thick jacket or more.

What is noticeable, though, is that the number of days with T-shirt weather is still greater: even in January and February, we regularly had lunch outside or sat in the sun in front of the house. Our “lease cat” Geert Mak shows this beautifully: sleeping in the sun on a cushion in a tray of kindling on top of the pile of wood for the fireplace!

We were not going to settle down in Nîmes, because it was precisely to avoid that that we had decided to RENT and not to BUY. We could say, however, after a few months, that overall we liked Nîmes quite a lot. The proximity to all kinds of things (shops, restaurants, terraces, culture, liveliness) was more important than specifically the city of Nîmes, even though it scores highly in terms of liveability. A small town with the popularity of much larger cities. It almost looked like Amsterdam….

In the end, it was not the city noise that made us decide to move on again, but…. THE NEIGHBOURS (l’histoire se répète, even in Ray we had to deal with an annoying neighbour once!). Though the flat had been newly built, it did not mean that it was orderly sound-insulated, on the contrary: every footstep was audible. Even at night! And because we soon had enough of that, we moved to a detached rental house in the countryside in November: in BARJAC.