Sète

The fishing boats come in at dawn and the restaurants benefit by noon. Sète, on France's Mediterranean coast, is a canal-laced port between the sea and the Thau lagoon, a town where the catch is still the calendar and the water jousting on the Canal Royal is treated with the seriousness other towns keep for football. Georges Brassens grew up in these streets and is buried on the hill above them, within sound of the sea he sang about.

Sète sits on a narrow strip between sea and the Thau lagoon, whose oyster and mussel beds feed the town's tables, and its quays — fishermen alongside artists, painted boats along the canals — are the working heart of it. Every summer the joutes nautiques fill the Canal Royal: teams in white on the prows of opposing boats, lance and shield, trying to knock each other into the water, a tradition the town has kept since the seventeenth century. The Halles are stacked with fish from the neighbouring market, and the tielle — the small spiced octopus pie the Neapolitan fishing families brought with them — is eaten on the hop. Above it all Mont Saint-Clair gives one of the finest panoramas on this coast, over the lagoon, the port and the sea, and the cemetery by the water where Paul Valéry lies is the one Brassens sang about; Brassens himself rests in the Py cemetery on the other side of the hill.