Ardeche great place to visit

by Peter and Katie
(Melbourne)

Our ‘newly discovered’ (and now favourite) region of France is the Ardeche in the south of France. We went there for a holiday last summer and only booked for a week, but wished we could have stayed longer.

We’re into active holidays and the Ardeche was perfect for that. You can hire canoes and kayaks and explore the spectacular Ardeche canyons. Hiking, biking and rockclimbing are also very popular.

Ardeche is also the kind of place where you can be driving around and suddenly come across these gorgeous little french villages, nothing much to do in them but very pretty to look at! We loved Roque-sur-Ceze and Saint-Chely-du-Tarn.

We enjoyed our meals in the Ardeche. It’s not so much fine cuisine, but more countrystyle cooking, like red wine stews and casseroles. We tried a goat’s cheese, Picodon, which was delicious. Ardeche is famous for chestnuts so alot of the dishes will have something with chestnut in it (including candied chestnuts).

Wine is also up and coming here and we enjoyed some very nice bottles of red.

So if you’re looking for something new to try, Ardeche gets a gold star from us.

Ardeche is easy to get to, we flew into Lyon and then hired a car from there, it was about a 2 hour drive to get to our gite.