French attraction wins the 'Oscar' for best theme park Le Puy du Fou theme park in the Vendée region of western France has been crowned 'Best Park' in the world at the >> Page 9 recent awards ceremony in Los Angeles
April 2012 Issue #30
Entire Limousin village for sale… yours for just €330,000 ♦ Includes 19 buildings, a tennis court, swimming pool and stables ♦ The village has lain empty since the early 1970s ♦ It has 3 ‘miraculous springs’ with healing powers! Jean-Pierre Chateau, who lives in the nearby countryside, told Le Figaro newspaper that it was “heartbreaking” to see the place as a “ghost village”. He said it once had a unique atmosphere with “village festivals which were held right up until the 1960s”. Following its demise, Courbefy passed through a number of owners, most of them foreign and all of them apparently without the requisite skills and/or budget to return the village to its former glory. There were plans to turn it into a holiday village in the 1990s, complete with hotels and restaurants, but the hugely expensive project was eventually abandoned. The most recent owners bought the village at the turn of the century, but by 2008 were unable to keep up with mortgage repayments.
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News - Trucker stopped on A20 watching DVD A Bulgarian trucker has fallen foul of tough new laws to combat dangerous driving >> Page 4
Culture - Au revoir, Mademoiselle
Alysa Salzberg takes a look at a recent law change which effectively bans the use of the word 'Mademoiselle' in France >> Page 11
© 2011 - besoindegauche — Charles Hendelus (WikiCommons)
A
n entire village in the heart of the Limousin is on the market and it could be yours for as little as €330,000. The story of how Courbefy, just outside Châlus in southern Haute-Vienne, came to be abandoned is a sad, but common one. Once a thriving village, the last inhabitants moved out around 1970, chasing jobs in new industries. It was not uncommon for villages to be abandoned around that time; running water was being brought to the last corners of France, but many people ended up leaving villages where connection was judged to be too difficult and expensive. Other villages were abandoned as farming became industrialized and small plots like those in Courbefy didn't lend themselves to mechanization.
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Bilingual - The Eiffel Conspiracy Files
New documents come to light showing that it was the British who built the Eiffel Tower >> Page 15
They may be bitter political rivals, but research has now shown that Sarkozy and Hollande are in fact cousins! >> Page 10
Your indispensible guide to the region's Businesses >> Centre Pages