High in the South of France

By Robert V. Camuto
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, September 2, 2007

We arrived outside Millau, France, at night, and the scene looked as if it had been designed for a Peter Jackson movie.

I drove with my wife and 12-year-old son down the steep, zigzagging roads of the Tarn Valley. Under the moonlight I could make out the rough outlines of cliffs and the profiles of small medieval villages. Then, what came into view in the distance made us catch our breath: A series of pointed towers -- looking like totems from another world and lighted a brilliant white -- seemed to be floating in the night sky.

"Whooooooooa," was our collective reaction.

The bridge is like that.

We had come to this part of the French Aveyron (considered a crossroads of southwest France, Languedoc and the Massif Central) not for the countryside of high sheep-farming plateaus and vibrant green valleys, not for the dramatic mountain gorges, not for the medieval chateaux, not even for one of the world's most famous cheeses.

We had come for the bridge.

The bridge is the Millau Viaduct, inaugurated in December 2004 as part of the Paris-Barcelona highway connecting central France with the southwest and Spain. It is part of a new generation of streamlined, cable-stayed bridges. It also happens to be -- at about 1,125 feet at its highest point -- the tallest bridge in the world, taller than the Eiffel Tower. Although it is not as visited a landmark as the tower, the bridge has developed an enthusiastic following. Its metalwork was done by Eiffel Construction, descended from Gustave Eiffel's own 19th-century engineering company. Hundreds of thousands of visitors have come to gawk at what's been called one of the world's modern wonders.

We awoke Saturday morning to a view of the bridge from the window of our hotel, a 12th-century chateau in nearby Creissels. The upper towers -- narrow inverted V shapes that support the strands of cabling, angled downward like taut piano strings -- seemed to be resting on a bed of fog.

After breakfast, we drove toward the essential stop on the Millau Viaduct admiration tour, the bridge's high-tech information center. As we approached the bridge, it became clear why the experience sends people away in awe.

The bridge spans a still, green farming valley and a ribbon of the Tarn River, stretching more than 1 1/2 miles over one of France's most graceful and open landscapes. Norman Foster, the bridge's British architect, said he designed the bridge to resemble a butterfly crossing the valley. The structure is supported from below by seven soaring, narrow piers shaped like tuning forks. This may be the lightest, sleekest bridge design anywhere. Framed by the surroundings, it is pure environmental sculpture.

After parking under the bridge, we entered the steel-and-glass information center, with exhibits and panels in French and English. At 10 a.m., the place was packed with scores of aqueduct enthusiasts digesting the facts, figures, photos and documentary films. We spent half an hour doing the same -- then about $50 in the gift shop, where the viaduct is memorialized in books, posters, postcards, backpacks, T-shirts and even thimbles.

And then we drove off, with the idea of crossing the bridge from the north (everyone told us that was the best direction) as the sun set that evening.

An Ideal Setting

Millau is a typical provincial town of about 21,000 with a long-standing sheep-tanning industry. It has some interesting structures and squares that date back to the Middle Ages, an old covered market and a grand antique public wash house, or lavoir. Its small, old stone bridges straddle the Tarn discreetly, and on nice days hang gliders circle the rock promontories above the town. Before the construction of the viaduct several miles west of town, Millau had its 15 minutes of fame in 1999 when French sheep farmer and anti-globalization activist Jos? Bov? led the ransacking of a local McDonald's. "McDo," as the French call it, still occupies its place on the edge of town.

The truly spectacular thing about Millau is its setting, surrounded by the regional park Des Grands Causses (the causses being the high, sparsely populated limestone plateaus that spread across the region).

It's a land of verdant sheep-country landscapes, small picturesque villages and remote castles. The Larzac plateau south of Millau boasts five fortified villages associated with the crusading orders of Templar and Hospitalier knights. It's a backpacker's haven, and in warm weather, families and sporting types come to rent canoes and kayaks along the Tarn.

Food lovers flock by car and bus to the home of Roquefort cheese, in nearby Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, a tiny village built onto a limestone rock mass known as the Combalou. In fact, to be called Roquefort, cheese must be made from ewe's milk and aged in the cool, damp caves of Combalou, legendary for a naturally occurring penicillium mold that turns cheese blue.

In short, the area has all the necessary elements for the ideal French road trip.

From the bridge, we crossed Millau and set out to the northeast to the region's most dramatic landscape: the Tarn gorges, where the river and a series of villages along it cut a path through the high plateaus.

It was a warm, cloudless day. Just before entering the gorges, we saw a chateau built into the side of a rock peak high up on a hill. We followed a road that could scarcely be called improved, bumping through vineyards and fruit orchards.

We arrived -- the only souls at the Chateau de Peyrelade, an alluring half-ruin from the 12th century that is so obscure it was not even noted in our Michelin guidebook on the region. The principal structure seemed to be built on, around and inside a massive rocky overhang. A sign mounted on a fortification wall out front, from which sprouted some weeds, announced that the chateau is open for visits from June 11 through Sept. 19, so it had closed about a month before our arrival.

The Tarn gorges wind 30 miles through the causses. The river below is luminous green, fed by natural springs. Along the river, villages seem to melt into the cliffs behind them and small, ancient stone bridges span the waterway. Also along the banks are occasional mom-and-pop snack bar/restaurant and kayak rental operations.

For several hours we explored a piece of this country. Leaving the main road at the village of Les Vignes, we crossed the river and took a switchbacking road up what is known as the Mejean Causse. As we arrived on the plateau, we passed hunter after hunter positioned at woods' edge with rifle, dog and fluorescent orange vest, apparently poised to shoot whatever beast emerged from the low woods.

Near a hamlet of houses with rough-hewn slate roofs and chickens that wandered freely in the road, we set out on a short hike to the point that our local map told us was known as the Roc de Serre. Surely, I figured, there would be no hunters to mistake us for wild boar on such a well-marked hiking trail. In fact, we saw no one at all on this 20-minute path, at the end of which we took in a panorama of the gorges with a view that seemed infinite.

Wonders Small and Large

That afternoon, we wound back down the Tarn gorges as the bridge beckoned. I headed toward the north end of the bridge to pick up the A75 highway, which would take us over the bridge to a point on a plateau south of Millau.

But first we made a slight detour. My wife and son -- who had picked up a tourist brochure at our hotel -- were convinced that we had to visit the Micropolis, which bills itself as the "City of Insects," in the village of Saint-Leons.

I expected to find one of those cheap, disappointing tourist traps you generally find anywhere in the middle of nowhere on this planet. Instead what we found was one of the best-conceived and -executed oddball-niche exhibits I've ever visited. I'm not an insect lover, but I was disappointed that we arrived just one hour before closing time.

The Micropolis sits at the edge of pastoral Saint-Leons -- significantly, the birthplace (in 1823) of French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. The Micropolis is housed in a series of modern structures built into the hillside like an ant colony, with a series of gardens and outdoor interactive sculpture exhibits spread over the surrounding grounds. The moment we passed the terrace with the Micropolis's restaurant/cafe, with a slick, fully stocked bar and big, gleaming espresso machine, my skepticism melted away. This, I could tell, was a class operation.

As for the exhibit hall itself, it was even better thought-out than the bar -- a painstakingly Gallic, detailed exploration of the insect world: beautiful, logically plotted, inventive, informative and, in a word, cool, with a series of exotic specimen displays, interactive exhibits, films and fantastic human-insect sculptures.

Another trip to the gift shop, another small wad of euros gone, and we set out toward the bridge in the orange evening light.

As we rolled down the A75 after paying the $7.35 toll, we noticed how the path was designed for dramatic effect. The roadway winds to the left, then banks down to the right to create a brilliant vantage. "Look at me," the bridge seems to be calling.

There is a rest stop just before the bridge deck, with an old farm that was in the process of being transformed into a deluxe visitors center. I got out of the car (by this time the rest of the family was pooped and stayed behind) and climbed a ridge and a set of stairs carved into a hillside, arriving at a stone lookout with a view over the steel towers and the viaduct.

This is one of those spots where people stare at their surroundings and feel profoundly reassured that they have arrived at a significant place. Just as if they are looking on the great pyramids, they take out their cameras and pass them around to engrave their images, reflexively joining a part of themselves forever with their surroundings.

I got back in the car and drove on the smooth blacktop toward the towers of white steel and taut cables, staying in the slower of the two lanes to savor the moment. There came a point when the horizon stretched in every direction, and we sensed we were floating through the center of France.

No one said it, but we felt the same thing: "Whooooooooa."

Robert V. Camuto last wrote for Travel about walking a portion of the Way of St. James in rural France.