Living in the Languedoc we are begining to discover, is like living nowhere else in France especially with reference to the climate and the weather. The easiest way to explain it is to look a physical map of France, we are very much controlled by our position between various mountain chains and the Mediterranean sea and the winds that these create.
Cast your eye down the map to the central southern coastal section and you will see where we are.
To our north we have the Massif Central, that huge plateau which dominates the centre of France. It also works to protect us from a lot of the cold weather from the north. If you move just a little east from us you will see that there is a gap between the Massif Central and the Alps which dominate the Eastern borders of France. Now that gap, down which flows the River Rhone, funnels down cold winds from the north right down to the sea, this is the dreaded Mistral from which the position of the mountains mercifully protects us. (We have had a French couple from Avignon who stayed with us last winter who confessed that the just wanted a Mistral free weekend). But we are not of course totally exempt from the cold winds of the north. If you look to the west of the Languedoc you will see that there is also a funnel to the west of us, between the Pyrenees and the Massif, down which occasionally flows a cold wind from the North West known as the Tramontane, strangely, if one looks to the effect of western winds in Ireland, this is not always a wet rain bearing wind as it has lost most of that on the way across France. When we came to live here first some farming friends who lived west of Carcassonne thought we were mad; “It is so dry there” they told us “you can’t raise cattle “. This is quite true. There are no cattle farms within an hour of our house.
In fact we have to rely on the Mistral to give us our winter rain. When the cold Mistral hit the Med at the Camargue it creates a wet misty rain known as The Maran, this does head off North Eastwards giving us our dull rainy days, mainly during the winter.
We very frequently find that when we watch the “Meteo” on French television that our Languedoc Mini Climate is different from the rest of France. Fortunately usually milder and easier on old joints and bones.