Welcoming Sète

Although we were delayed in leaving yesterday’s port of Barcelona, we arrived this morning at the charming little seaport of Sète in Occitania. A squadron of powerful little tugboats met us at the mouth of the harbor and led us in a delicate little dance. At the end of it our ship backed in to a small pier. This tiny Seaport is too small for any of the mega-liners that block the sun in major harbors, but our ship of 720 passengers with the help of half a dozen tugs slipped right in despite the forty-mile-per-hour winds that wanted to push us against the rocks. At one point our bow was less than fifty feet from the jetty. I observed that parking an ocean liner is an art. No one does it better than the crew of the Viking Sky.

This part of France has its own unique character. It certainly is not Paris. The region derives its name Occitania from a peculiarity of linguistic history. The Franks north of here said “yes” by using their word “oui,” which became standard over most of the country. However, in this little corner of France, speakers would say “yes” using their word “oc.” Their dialect became known to the other Franks as “the language of ‘oc,’ or Languedoc. The region thus became known as Oc-citania.

This area has been the theater for many cultural and religious revolutions that have marked French history, including the attempted reformation of the Roman Catholic Church by a group of ascetic reformers called the Catharii. But more about them in the next footprint.Read more