When I tell you that we visited a park last weekend to get away from midwinter blues, you will still have no idea of the type of thing that we saw and the type of experience that we had.
Whether we had a pleasant but essentially low-octane stroll between flowerbeds, well-tendered lawns and playgrounds for children or whether we visited one of these nature reserves where bears and wolves roam freely.
The département with the greatest concentration of such hybrid nature reserves is the Alpes Maritimes, a territory that covers the French Riviera and its wider hinterland. This is a stark contrast, which clearly leaves a lot of ground in between.
If, however, I tell you which of the various levels of the French government was responsible for the park in question, you would already have a far better idea.
In France (as anywhere in the world), municipal parks have been laid out for the sole purpose of providing pleasure and joy to urban dwellers, whereas national parks are primarily conservation projects that, almost as an afterthought, also welcome human guests.
In France, this “middle ground” is covered by parks under the authority of the départements, the intermediate level of government, which aim to square the needs of their citizens with their duties of preserving the natural environment by setting up “civilized encounters with nature”.
Over the next few weeks and months, we shall be having a closer look at some of these parks with the aim of banishing midwinter blues.
The 19 parks of the Alpes Maritimes provide a fascinating variety of coast and back country, ranging from the red rock beaches of the western Riviera to the lunar landscapes of the high Alps, passing through some swampy marshlands of the area’s rivers along the way.
To start off this series, we are travelling to the outskirts of Nice. The Parc Estienne d’Orves is the smallest and easiest-to-reach of the batch, a mere 15-minute walk away from Nice central station: the perfect ticket for the short daylight hours of a midwinter’s day.
Turn right out of the station, walking past the post office, perhaps the most impressive of the city’s many beautiful Art Deco buildings …
… and continue past the road signs which show the way to the Russian Cathedral (you are only a couple of blocks away. If you have never been, this is as good an opportunity as any for a visit), towards the motorway flyover on Place Saint Philippe.
Walk underneath the busy road over your head, turn left into Avenue Estienne d’Orves and follow this street for about five minutes until you spot the entrance to the park on the left side of the parking lot.
Right behind the entrance, a footpath zigzags up the hill. You are free to use the stairways that cut through the rough in between the sequence of swerves and curves.
We, however, recommend to walk on the serpentine road which provides great views over the snow-capped peaks of the Alps on one side and the Mediterranean on the other.
You can even try to spot the onion-shaped towers of the Russian Cathedral in the dense cityscape underneath, for a variation of the game known as “Where’s Waldo?”. (Or “Where’s Vladimir”, in this case.)
Soon, you will reach the – sadly delapidated – Villa Bellevue, once the home of the Count Estienne d’Orves who used to own most of the land around.
Walk past the villa to find the most direct way to the heartpiece of the park: the estate’s olive orchard …
… which gives you a good idea of how tall and wide olive trees can grow if commercial yield is not the primary consideration …
… and of the majestic proportions these trees can assume.
The star of the garden is a tree which is said to be 1000 years old (which is probably best understood not literally but only to mean “very, very old”) and which can be easily recognized as it is the only tree around which has been fenced in.
You can do this short walk around the Parc Estienne d’Orves at any time of the year, but the effect on a sunny day in winter was truly magical.
It felt like stepping out of time into a land where the normal rules of nature (according to which winter provides the hostile, desolate and barren background that allows the other seasons of the year to shine) do not apply.
It is not enough that everything around you is green: in the sunlit meadows underneath the trees, there are even flowers blooming, with swarms of bees humming around them. Most pleasant way to banish midwinter blues.
