France’s greatest Mediterranean town? There’s no contest

People often ask me which is my favourite town on the French Mediterranean coast. Well, they don’t really, but I wish they would because I have my reply ready. It is Sète on the Languedoc littoral, roughly 40 minutes from both Montpellier and Béziers airports.

I decided this some time ago and reaffirmed it recently over quantities of sea bass, octopus and oysters which rendered me an aquarium on legs. “Carry on at this rate,” said my wife, “and we’ll be talking about endangered species.”

“That’s why,” I replied, shovelling, “I’m obliged to eat them while the going is good.” And we drank draughts of Picpoul-de-Pinet as if stocks of the local white wine might also be under threat.

You have probably heard of this 45,000-strong town. It encircles the Mont-Saint-Clair, a lone hill on the Languedoc coast, with the Med out front, the 18,500-acre Étang de Thau lagoon behind.

Nine canals link the two, defining the town and providing a current which energises it.

Then again, Sète is pretty good at energising itself. People from across the Mediterranean are crammed in around the waterways, especially Italians or those of Italian descent. That’s why most of the local specialities major on tomato derivatives. There’s no avoiding pasta either. Don’t miss Maison Politi on Grand’Rue Mario Roustan.

All these folk have been rolling in to do the work – digging, fishing, shipping – since the town was established in 1666. Back then, Louis XIV ordered Sète be built as the port at the end of the Canal du Midi, itself intended as the main part of a Bordeaux-to-Med link. Prosperity arrived fast. Sète was soon shipping out more wine than anywhere else in the world. Barrels filled warehouses and canal quays.

Meanwhile, fishermen from around Naples arrived mob-handed. They needed a break from southern Italian poverty and, later, Mussolini. Sète remains the French Med’s main fishing port.

Rich people put up Haussmannian buildings, frequented the Italianate Molière theatre and, if from outside, stayed at the Grand Hotel. Round its 19th-century indoor patio, this still requires a certain elegance of behaviour. My game needed raising.

Outside is the unfiltered boisterousness of the real Mediterranean, with no grasp of volume control. And it’s that way all year round. Other Med spots pretty much shut down come autumn, when the jet-set departs. But the trawler-set never knocks off.

They’re out every day, from around 3am till mid-afternoon, when they barrel back to bulk large along the town centre canals. Here be big boats with radars, winches, nets the size of Wastwater and the allure of sea-going seriousness, and smaller ones as battered as their occupants. If so minded, they could chuck sea bass directly into the kitchens of water-front restaurants.

It is because Sète lives lively without visitors that visitors might wish to go. That said, eight miles of beach, recently rewilded, also help. All the beach restaurants now gather near the town.

La Ola is the one to aim for. We romped along into a wind which, this being April, was blowing our eyebrows off. I was just glad we weren’t there on the first week of July when the Worldwide Festival floods the sands with electro-jazz, international DJs and, according to a local lady, “lots of young people from northern Europe whose legs turn red in the sun” .

Then we climbed up the 600-feet Mont-Saint-Clair. I say “climb”. What I mean is “took a bus”. Views from the top are arresting, as views from the tops of things generally are: the tangle of port and red-roofed town below, sparkling acreage of Med out front, the lagoon behind colonised by military formations of oyster tables (looking like landing craft, ready to attack) and, separating the two, a tongue of land licking out to distant Agde, vines in the middle, beaches unravelling at the edge.

Over yonder, mountains and villages appear to have settled their differences centuries ago.

Going up means having to come down. We stopped off half-way at Forêt Pierre Blanche, a wildly unexpected 67-acre in-town park for walking amid rocks and pines, before lunch at La Mesa restaurant (mains from £18.50).

Down further, the Musée Paul Valéry honours one of France’s cleverest fellows. Born in Sète in 1871, Valéry was a poet, essayist, philosopher and all-round literary titan, the sort of chap more esteemed in France than in Britain. He looked much like Sir Anthony Eden.

More effervescent is the museum’s collection of raucous, cartoonesque works by local artists, and figurative libre leaders, Hervé Di Rosa and Robert Combas. The latter’s painting of Hannibal’s elephants by-passing Sète is art as rock’n’roll.

For a working town, Sète is pretty hot on art. Galleries proliferate. So do sculptures. The gigantic octopus before the town hall on Place Léon Blum gives proper dimension to Sète’s emblematic beast. (“A town which erects a monument to the glory of the octopus on its town-hall square is a town of high civilisation,” said writer Jacques Roure.) Frescoes enliven walls all over town. Some 400 artists are at work here.

Wandering, you’ll maybe bump into other visitors tracking locations associated with Demain Nous Appartient (“Tomorrow Belongs To Us”), a glossy soap opera set in Sète, broadcast daily since 2017 by France’s main TV channel. It’s OK, but lacks the grit of Coronation Street.

Later, you’ll not miss the fishing port, the commercial port or the long Saint Louis jetty, from which Exodus 1947 sailed on July 11, 1947. The ship was carrying 4,500 survivors of the Holocaust illegally bound for Mandatory Palestine. They were blocked by the British off the Palestinian coast and, eventually, shipped back to Germany, earning opprobrium for our nation.

You will continue to the market where, when food lust threatens, you’ll bag a seat in the food court bit, then tour the stalls for a tielle (octopus and spicy tomato pie), a dozen oysters for a fiver, a glass of muscat sec, and a serving of Sète speciality macaronade (penne rigate with bits of beef, pork and sausage, slices of bacon, in a thick wine and tomato sauce).

It’s sustenance for a month or, to put it another way, adequate daily preparation for the jouteurs – solid, white-clad fellows who spend summer months perched on platforms at the back of boats wielding iron-tipped lances, being rowed at one another in jousts. The rowing is assured by 10 equally stout chaps.

The intention, obviously, is to knock the big bloke on the other boat into the central Canal Royal. They make a hell of a splash. It’s the national sport of this small part of France and a sight more entertaining than the Tour de France. Matters come to a head during the great Saint Louis fête at the end of August. This is Henley Regatta with added pandemonium.

Now it is time to tackle oysters up close. You might take a tourist boat from the Canal Royal. Or you might call in someone like Ryan Denia of L’Evasion-de-Thau for a small-boat trip round the tables, and the sort of subject mastery you’d want from an ex-oyster farmer.

Finally, make for one of the waters-edge oyster farms which offer tastings. These evolve to a full lunch pretty seamlessly. Airs and graces are off the menu in the apparently ramshackle surroundings of the oyster farm.

My, it’s delightful: sun (even in April), lagoon at arm’s length, workers stirring, good company, glass of picpoul, brown bread, a dozen oysters. Difficult to see how midday could be improved.

Or as Sète poet Paul Valéry said: “At present, I can see nothing which requires a tomorrow.” Quite.

Getting there

Fly to Béziers from Luton, Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh with Ryanair or Montpellier from Gatwick with easyJet. Shuttle bus to respective stations, for short train hop to Sète.

Staying there

The Grand Hotel has the swish of 19th-century class reviewed and corrected for the 21st century (doubles from £126).

Getting around

No need for a car. Buses, hire bikes and shuttle boats get you wherever you need. Details at the Tourist Office.

Eating there

Sète abounds in restaurants, boasting shoals of fish. The Grand’s own Quai 17 restaurant is commendable (three-course menu £34). So is the Paris-Méditerrannée (three-course menu £34). And best of many canal-side restaurants may be Coquillages & Crustacés; three course lunch menu £22, dinner mains from £22).

Oysters

Oyster outing possibilities are manifold; check at the Tourist Office. Shuttle boats operate across the lagoon, where Laurent Arcella’s Atelier & Co oyster farm in Loupian offers a fine shellfish experience – not only oysters but every other edible shellfish known to man, both raw and cooked. Plus a sort of oyster pâté (rillettes) all their own. Amid the oyster farm clutter, I’d have stayed all day.