Our Blog - Summer in Toulouse

It is always interesting when you get to summer in France. Depending on where you are, things either get ridiculously busy, or ridiculously dead! The good thing about Toulouse is that it seems to be right in the middle. I'll explain what I mean ....

Toulouse definitely doesn't get the mass of tourists that Paris gets, nor does everybody leave the city. But the students tend to leave, as do lots of workers who take their families on vacation for the summer break, which runs from about the 14th of July to sometime in the first week of September. The actual date changes each year and is called "la rentrée" or "the return". Toulouse does get a small subset of tourists and the places (restaurants/cafe's) in and around the key tourist areas remain open through the summer, some with longer hours. But as you walk through more of the neighborhoods, you start seeing signs on the doors of restaurants, bars, small stores, and cafes that indicate they are closed for the holidays, normally reopening the end of August sometime.

Some of the travel magazines say that around 35 million French people travel for the summer holidays (out of a total of 65 million) and there are 2 opposing "clans": Juillettistes et Aoûtiens (July-vacationers et August-vacationers). Traditionally, August was the vacation time for the working class, as many factories would close. July ended up being the vacation time for the executives and those in more white-collar professions that could be a bit freer to choose their vacation dates. The split between working class and white collar is much less now and today people tend to take their vacations that straddle the 2 months. In one tourist office on the Atlantic coast, there are more people with reservations from July 15th to August 15th, and the number of accommodation bookings for the last week of August drops off.

Back to Toulouse ... the website of the City Hall lists quite a few activities during the summer for those who are in town. For 5 weeks (22 July to 28 August), a huge park on the Garonne River is turned into the "Toulouse Plage" (or Toulouse beach). While it isn't quite like the Paris Plage, where they create an artificial beach by dumping tons of sand, they do transform the park into various areas, including areas to try various Olympic sports like beach volleyball (complete with sand pits), badminton, and archery. There is a little library installed with seats so that you can relax and read in the shade, and you can rent boats and kayaks to take out on the river.

There is an outdoor theater each year, where various movies are shown after dark on a large screen installed in a courtyard. This year, we got to see Casablanca on the big screen!! There are lots of different music festivals and festivals set in the Middle Ages, where you can relax inside the Cloister of the Convent of the Jacobins, listen to music, try out some medieval food, and learn from artisans about life in the Middle Ages.

Lots of things to do for the summer break!