This is a seaside town, a holiday town, though not entirely, which was built several decades ago into what had been a forested and often marshy flat space near the foothills of the Pyrenees. Of all the various species of trees with which the planners replanted the new avenues and open spaces, none is more appreciated than the stone pine (pinus pinea), which not only looks handsome and shapely, even when well grown, but is a source of nourishment to more than a few inhabitants and visitors. You often see people in pairs, filling their plastic bags with the pine nuts which cover the gravel or tarmacadam on the streets under the trees.
These nuts, about three-quarters of an inch long, fall at this time of the year as the large, orange-sized cones open and scatter their scores and scores of nuts. It is not difficult to open them with a rap of a stone or some heavy object and inside you find the softish, bland nut which in Ireland we buy in packets in grocery shops for salads or for decorating cakes or confectionery. Or just to nibble when roasted. In French they are known as pignons. Hard work to get enough, but the French are a persistent people with a taste for what is good.
And when it rains and the snails come out, the cultivated, grassy and bushy strip of land along the sea is swarming with gourmets, bearing plastic bags and baskets to collect not only the snails, but also any mushrooms which may have come up. A favourite and famous dish here is called a cargolade - snails roasted, preferably over a fire of vine twigs and branches. Y