Day 1419 (Tuesday) 27th April 2021.
Shock horror, it was overcast this morning but at least we didn’t get the showers that were predicted. Huw kindly gave me a lift to the Prom because I had to go to the school before the Marriot to pick up some paperwork from Anna.
Avenue Jean Medicin (the Oxford street of Nice) was deserted and all the shops were shut
From there I caught the tram to the hotel. Gilles and I had a lovely chat in the conference room on the seventh floor for 45 minutes before going downstairs for a coffee. Gilles had invited one of his colleagues to join us and she was a delight. I didn’t catch her name but she is just 22-years-old and oozed confidence. She works in the Marriot three days a week and studies for her master’s in accountancy two days a week. Her English is impeccable and I was amazed to hear that she is Russian and has been in France since she was 5 and she is trilingual. These three languages are so important here because there are so many English speakers and Russians living here – she could get a job doing anything. She knows exactly what she wants out of life and her career and I believe she is going to be a huge success. I was really impressed with how comfortable she was speaking to people so much older than herself (Gilles will be 50 in August). We ended up chatting for the whole lesson and she told me that Gilles talks about me a lot and it’s all super-positive. We have decided that when our classes finish in June he is going to come to Le Phare regularly to practise his Irish and he’s going to help me with my French. Speaking of the Irish he lent me the box set of Father Ted, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t like this programme. He told me that niece who lives in Juan les Pins visited him last week bearing gifts; three curly Wurleys for his daughter and a packet of sausages bought from Geoffrey’s, I was so jealous but hopefully we’ll be able to go there after the announcement on Monday. I caught the tram and bus home and as the weather was a bit poo I did some of my jigsaw and prepared lessons for the rest of the week. I got an email from my school Aurdalangues this afternoon informing me that Florence (Oceane’s mother) only has 16 hours of classes left. I have been working with this family for over three years, with Florence, Claree and Oceane and I can’t imaging not going to Saint Jean Cap Ferrat every Wednesday afternoon. Oceane is the first child I’ve ever really liked and I’ve watched grow from an 8-year-old child to an 11-year-old young lady. Villefranche was even more empty than Nice
Badger has developed a new personality in the last few days and allows us to pick him up for a few minutes.
The next perched village on my list is Castagniers, I am so looking forward to going to all these places. (The following photos are not mine.)
Castagniers ( Castanhiers in Occitan Nice < castanhier en: chestnut) is a hilltop village located in the department of Alpes-Maritimes in the region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur . Its inhabitants are called the Castagnérenques .
Until 1860, the official name was in Italian: Castagnera.
Location
Former hamlet of Aspremont, detached in 1874. Village located near Carros, but on the left bank of the Var , 18 km from Nice.
Geology and relief
This small village in the hinterland of Nice, which takes its name from a secular chestnut tree which offered shelter to travellers, is very extensive. The chestnut tree gives its name to the village and appears in the coat of arms of the town.
This small territory which dominates the Var valley is in the centre of a landscape of wooded hills. It is made up of several hamlets with evocative names: les Moulins, la Grotte, la Garde, le Vignon, le Cabrier, le Carretier ... Its oldest district, le Masage, with cobbled streets and vaulted passages dates from 1870 .
Village nestled under Mount Cima, the highest point of the town with its 154m altitude.
Lines of communication and transport
Roads
Accessible from Route nationale 202 , exit Les Moulins, route de Castagniers via the Gorguette valley.
Public transport
Transport in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
Municipality served by the Lignes d'Azur network .
SNCF lines
Line from Nice to Digne at the bottom of the Var valley, from Nice CP train station .
Typology
Castagniers is a rural commune. It is in fact part of the municipalities with little or very little density, within the meaning of the municipal density grid of INSEE (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques. The National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, abbreviated INSEE, is the national statistics bureau of France. It collects and publishes information about the French economy and people and carries out the periodic national census.)
Castagniers belongs to the urban unit of Nice , an intra-departmental agglomeration grouping together 51 municipalities and 942,886 inhabitants in 2017, of which it is the suburb . The agglomeration of Nice is the seventh largest in France in terms of population, behind those of Paris , Lyon , Marseille-Aix-en-Provence , Lille (French part) ,Toulouse and Bordeaux .
In addition, the municipality is part of the attraction area of Nice , of which it is a municipality in the crown. This area, which includes 100 municipalities, is categorised in areas of 200,000 to less than 700,000 inhabitants.
History
Castagniers is the stronghold of the Borriglione until the French Revolution. In 1874 , Castagniers and the municipality of Colomars broke away from Aspremont at the request of the population and thus became two independent municipalities.
In July 2017, a fire burned more than 100 hectares of forest in commune.
Demographic trends
The evolution of the number of inhabitants is known through the population censuses carried out in the municipality since 1876. From 2006, the legal populations of the municipalities are published annually by INSEE . The census is now based on an annual collection of information, successively concerning all the municipal territories over a period of five years. For municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants, a census survey covering the entire population is carried out every five years, the legal populations of the intervening years being estimated by interpolation or extrapolation. For the municipality, the first exhaustive census falling under the new system was carried out in 2008.
In 2018, the town had 1,635 inhabitants, an increase of 6.38% compared to 2013 ( Alpes-Maritimes : + 0.5%, France excluding Mayotte : + 2.36%).
Things to do and see in Castagniers
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