Nature’s fragile beauty at ease with man
WHENEVER I travel abroad, I make a point of staying at least a week in a national park. This summer I again stayed in the Camargue National Park for two weeks’ exploration away from the beaten trails. This French region is a model of a national park, where both man and nature can succeed in balanced ways.
The Camargue, or the River Rhone delta, is geographically defined in the north by the Roman city of Arles (population 53,000) and to the very south by the picturesque seaside village of Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer, with its simple but graceful fortified church, which can be seen from many kilometres away.
To the west lies the Petit (small) Rhone and to the east the Grand (great) Rhone. The debouchment of both these branches of the river is the Mediterranean Sea, backed by long sandy beaches for 75km and, inland, large etangs (lagoons).
This huge delta area, covering 100,000ha, was created at the end of the Quaternary Ice Ages, 11,000 years ago, when vast quantities of silt, sand and stones from the melting continental and alpine glaciers were dumped into the Mediterranean Sea. Water now covers a third of this delta area and the vast Etang de Vaccares is some 6,000ha in area. The width of the floodplains of the present branches of the Rhone are five to 10 times today the width of each of the rivers themselves.
It was in the early 1960s that France, like the Netherlands (with the River Rhine’s debouchmentintotheNorthSea), took the lead in fortifying the Rhone’s riverbanks to alleviate local flooding downstream. The source of the Rhone is in Switzerland and thus the glacial meltwaters in springtime swell the river’s volume. Upstream navigable canals have been cut and lock gates created together with hydroelectric stations to utilise this river.
In the Camargue, the landscape is crisscrossed with smaller canals banked with dykes (digues) to utilise the freshwater for irrigation purposes. In this millennium, with climate change evident, French engineers have fortified the banks of the Rhone by building up stout stone walls to alleviate future flooding as glacial melting increases and sea levels rise. Camargue Regional National Park This vast national park is officially owned by the Ministry of the Environment and is run on a basis of consultation between the local authorities, local people, and economic decision makers. Its basic tenet is to reconcile both human development and nature conservation. With its highest point at only four metres above mean sea-level, clearly human occupation must be respected for 10,000 people live in this wetland, working in farming, fishing and the service sectors of industry.
Within this unique domain there are 5,700 animal and plant species (excluding invertebrates), of which 489 are protected. Interestingly, this area has recorded 75 per cent of France’s bird species, 50 per cent of its freshwater fish species, and 25 per cent of its plant species. The etangs are separated from the sea by natural sand bars and sand dunes, providing a refuge for birds, fish, spectacular flowering plants, and a number of rare insects in the sand dunes. Flamingos, in their hundreds, are spectacular, together with egrets and numerous species of heron, and are sights to behold. Many of these bird species will migrate to northern Africa for the winter months.
Nearer to the sea there are salt pans – lagoons adapted by human intervention to maximise salt concentrations. Near Salin-de-Giraud, these salt areas provide ‘pecking’ grounds for pink flamingos because of the rich invertebrate life there. Haloseres (salt tolerant plants) abound, such as glasswort, saltwort, obione and statice.
Because of the high temperatures (over 30 degrees Celsius) and high evaporation rates at the height of summer, these plants are well marked by white salt stripes on their leaves. The saltworks at Giraud covers 6,000ha and annually produces 340,000 tonnes of sodium chloride for the chemical industry.
Inland from the coast, the riverbanks exhibit many hydroseres (freshwater plants), such as bulrushes, canes and reeds, which all provide shelter and nesting for ducks and other watering birds. The reeds, locally known as ‘sango’, are cut in wintertime to provide roofing thatch for traditional single-storey Camarguaise houses known as ‘cabanes’. Working and living in this paradise Rice farming covers 20 per cent of the land area of the Camargue, for this area is certainly France’s ‘rice bowl’, if not Europe’s. It was in 1593 that King Henri IV of France decreed that this delta area should produce rice and sugar cane. There is no evidence of the latter crop today but rice farming abounds alongside fields of sunflowers, whose seeds are crushed to produce cooking oil. River water is abstracted from the River Rhone and pumped into the rice beds to desalinate the soil. The rice beds are flooded in April and planted by small machines ready for harvest time in September.
With daytime temperatures averaging at 28 degrees Celsius between late April and August, the rice plants soon ripen under constant irrigation. Nowadays the local rice farming is machine-intensive, with four varieties produced.
Harvest time is celebrated well here as, indeed, it is celebrated in Sabah and Sarawak. Ongoing festivals take place for the Feria du Riz in Arles, the rice capital of the Camargue, and in local villages elsewhere. This year I stayed on a rice farm, with its compound containing greyish white Camargue horses.
Horse ranching is also a natural feature in this delta area, with the horses released into the wilderness to graze, mate and foal, and then to be branded to denote the owner’s lineage when the foal is about six months of age. A roundup of these semi feral horses takes place every year by the ‘Gardians’. The Camargue is renowned for its black cattle or ‘taureau’ rearing, providing a source of beefsteak for the local and national markets, with its horns pointed skywards. The beef cattle are divided into two types: the genuine Camargue race weighing 450kg and the 19th century-introduced Spanish cattle, of a much heavier breed at 600kg. From the latter, the most ferocious and audacious bulls maybe selected for bullfights at the ‘corridas’ or seasonal bullfights in the Roman arena of Arles.
In some parts of the Camargue, merino sheep were interbred with local sheep in the early 19th century and shepherds may be seen with their flocks which graze on wild pastures.
The development of the summer tourist trade is strictly confined to certain areas and it is to the credit of the farmers that they have taken the initiative in providing places for tourists to stay or in taking guided horse treks into these wetlands to truly experience the Camargue’s natural beauty.
In 1977, the Camargue was designated by Unesco as a Biosphere Reserve. Sustainable development has happened here with a 10-yearly assessment since then.
This is a special area, displaying how the conservation of the natural world can work hand in hand with human activities to include sustainable tourism and research into this National Parks biodiversity.
Even with lagoons present and mosquitoes around, I’m pleased to say that I was not bitten once.