Located in a basin, surrounded by the high, rocky cliffs of the Gemmi pass, Leukerbad, or Loèche-les-Bains for the French-speaking Swiss, is the largest spa resort in Switzerland. It’s an extremely picturesque place for some, inauspicious for others. “Few people making plans for a holiday would elect to come here,” wrote James Baldwin in 1953, adding that “the landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach.”
The first exhibition in Paris in over a century of Rosa Bonheur’s paintings and sculptures, currently on until Jan. 15, 2023, marks the bicentenary of the animal portraitist who was the most famous, highly paid artist of the XIXth century until she fell into complete oblivion in the XXth. Her resuscitation, and the Musée d’Orsay exhibition, are due to Katherine Brault and her family, single-handedly responsible for putting Bonheur firmly back in the limelight. As a complement to the exhibition I recommend that you take a 45-minute train and visit the Château de By, today the Rosa Bonheur museum, owned by the Brault family.
A family wedding this summer at a place called Bredenbury which is… well in the middle of nowhere really, in the west of central England, SW of Birmingham, was the occasion to discover a part of the British Isles I’d never been to before…
Sarajevo. For some the city is associated with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914, triggering the First World War. For others, with the 1984 Winter Olympic Games. But for many it evokes the longest siege in modern history, one imposed on this ancient Ottoman/Austro-Hungarian city by Serb nationalists from April 1992 to February 1996. But as a holiday destination? Not really.
“I'm going to Denmark on holiday." Apart from the "what on earth for?" from my 91-year old mother-in-law, everyone else's reaction was "Oh, I love Copenhagen." My response that I wasn't going to Copenhagen, at least not for the first of the two weeks, was generally met by a blank stare of incomprehension…
When you buy gold earrings whilst on holiday, one of them breaks and the shop sends you a new pair…
I was drawn to Girona, 99km northeast of Barcelona, by the 63rdTemps de Flors (Fiesta de Flores) or Flower Festival. If it hadn't been for that, I would probably not have bothered to go to this city, which I'd only vaguely heard about …
I have to be up-front here and admit straight out that I don't much care for the Surrealist work of Salvador Dalí. But, whilst in northern Catalonia it seemed an obvious thing to do to visit at least one of the three Salvador Dalí museums and try to understand what it was she liked about this bizarre man's work…
My only experience of Catalonia thus far was Barcelona, where public signage is in both Catalan and Spanish and you hear more Spanish than Catalan spoken. But we're staying 60 kms north of Barcelona in the village of Sant Pol de Mar for the next 10 days and the Catalan language here is not only omnipresent but frequently unaccompanied by any Spanish translation…
