Should you come and stay with us for seven or more days on a personal empowerment workshop, you will spend Thursday morning at the weekly fresh food market in Eauze, a thriving country town not far from us. As you know by now, we have this awkward fixation with feeding our retreat guests bodies as well, as healthily and as sumptuously as their minds.
Our retreats are designed to help our guests manage stress and as part of this aim of ours, we introduce our guests to the local, laid-back lifestyle. In this part of Europe (Gascony), in the south-west of France, people eat and drink what would elsewhere be considered a very rich diet, and still they manage to remain slim, fit and healthy and live to an advanced age.
I am convinced that their healthy, fresh, organic, often home-grown and nearly always home-cooked diet has a lot to do with this. We therefore take our visitors to the largest and most popular fresh food farmers’ market in the area, the market at Eauze, to show them where the inhabitants of this region buy their food.
For most of our guests, this is one of the highlights of their stay. It is true that it is a singular and unforgettable experience. Rather that try and put it all into words, I will let the pictures below do the talking.
Before you get to the pictures, you may want to have a look at this short clip of the Eauze market, as screened by TF1 (a leading French TV station) during the news hour :
CLICK HERE to view the video of Eauze market on TF1.
Dr Margaretha Montagu 
Wow – it’s making me want to eat loads of fruit just looking at it!
Luckily it is summer now and there is a lot of fresh fruit readily available to eat at the moment. My current favourite is watermelon – great in this heat!
Such a good read!