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As the last walk before our summer break away from the Mediterranean, we had to complete some unfinished easy hiking business along the River Var after last month’s aborted mission.

"continuing an unfinished easy hiking business along the River Var"

The Var is the river of the French southeast. Not so much because it was long or mighty – it is neither, not even making the top 20 of France’s longest or most voluminous waterways – but because it is culturally significant. It divides the region into an Italianate east (with Nice, Monaco and beyond) and a Franco-French west.

For all towns to the east of the Var, the Italians have a name in their own language, because all these towns once belonged to Italian-language regions that ultimately became parts of Italy.

Villefranche in Italian is Villafranca, Roquebrune is called Roccabruna and Nice – incidentally the hometown of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy’s national hero – is Nizza.

To identify the French towns in the West, conversely, Italians just mis-pronounce the French: as in the two-syllable Can-nès, much to the mirth of French day trippers who are listening to the announcements in local Italian railway stations.

Hiking trips to the Var are tricky for one reason alone: the river is cut off from its hinterland by busy transport links. The main trail runs on the river’s left (eastern) bank where a highway – which later merges into a motorway – and a parallel railway track are hemming in the foot path.

"Train des Pignes - unfinished easy hiking business along the River Var"

All plans of hiking this trail – which is otherwise well-developed – have to deal with the problem that there is only a small number of bridges or underpasses and, even more acutely, that these underpasses are not always reliably indicated on maps of the area, so you never know in advance what you are going to get.

Once you are on the trail, you will be fine (and stumble upon one or two of the “hidden” underpasses), but getting there can be a bit of a challenge.

Our unfinished easy hiking business along the River Var

The trail is best accessed through the stops on the Chemins de Fer de Provence railway line. The trains on this line are otherwise known as the Trains de Pignes which circulate two or three times daily between Nice and Digne-les-Bains in the Alps.

The first stretch of the line, however, has more frequent trains (roughly once an hour) which provide a useful connection to Nice’s outer suburbs in the west.

Watch out, however: these trains do not leave from the Nice Ville central station but from a separate station a 10-minute walk further to the north (on Rue Alfred Binet).

To finish our easy hiking business along the River Var, we will take the train to Colomars where the suburban part of the network ends. Just step off the platform at Colomars and turn left along the river.

"peek of the alps along the River Var"

The trail itself is rather charmless: for most of its course, it is essentially a gravel road. You will see quite a few (temporarily) inactivated diggers and dredgers, and there is evidence of industrial fly-tipping.

For much of its length, the trail has all the allure of a road that services a cement factory in rural Albania.

It does not help that the river is generally hidden behind trees: the Var is relatively far away from the trail, and the foot path is not high enough for you to get a scenic overview.

You can only continuously see the river on one brief stretch where the main road is blocked and a narrow footpath reroutes hikers through the bushes of the embankment on your left.

"trail along the River Var"

Every five hundred metres or so, however, the view opens up when one of the many weirs comes into sight.

The Var is used to generate electricity, and its flowing speed is highly regulated, which is why the face of the river alternates between a swampy pond …

"swampy pond of River Var"

… and a lively mountain creek.

"controlled water flow of the river Var"

Before it was regulated, the Var must have been a great deal more mighty. So mighty in fact that a dike was built under Napoleon to tame it.

"dike from Napoleonic times"

The 200-year old dike is still there: it’s the embankment on which the road and the railway line run on your left. Look across to the right bank when you get a full view of the river (when one of the weirs comes into sight): all that territory in between was once covered by the Var.

"the River Var"

It is difficult to imagine the entire basin filled with water when you are hiking this trail at the height of summer (as we did), but you must bear in mind that the Var is a mountain river.

Unlike, say, Rhine or Danube, which are well supplied with fresh rainfall throughout the year, the Var’s volume of flow varies wildly: it carries a lot of water in the spring when the mountain snow melts but is nearly dry in the middle of the summer.

At any time between June and September, this gives you the opportunity of exploring a rare landscape that can stretch out for a hundred metres between trail and river, part fluvial floodlands and part sandy desert.

"sandy desert along the river Var

We finished the walk after approx. 2 hours at Saint Sauveur, another stop on the Provence railway line. Earlier on the walk, a sign had alerted hikers to the fact that the path was closed near Lingostière (the next stop on the line), so we did not want to risk getting stuck.

At Saint Sauveur, there is a large shopping centre with fully air-conditioned supermarkets and fast food restaurants, so even if you have just missed a train (as we did), life could be worse.

Saint Sauveur, incidentally, is also the place where the “official trail“ of the Parc Naturel des Rives du Var starts (which leads almost all the way to Nice Airport).

One of these days, we will come back to give the Var a second chance.

"more sandy parts of the river Var"
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