We had booked into Le Brasilia for 4 nights (which eventually turned into 5) knowing that it is a good spot with plenty of interesting places to visit in the surrounding area. The day after our visit to Le Barcares, we drove south to the slightly larger town of Elne, reputed to be the oldest town in the area. Elne was where Hannibal, after crossing the Pyrenees in 218 BC, paused to negotiate a peaceful crossing of Gaul on his way to attack Rome. From it’s position on the Tech River, a few miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea, it grew to become one of the most prominent cities in the area and remained so until slowly eclipsed by Perpignan in the late Middle Ages. Now it is a quiet predominantly agricultural town of less than 10,000 people.
The town’s most interesting features are the Cathedral of Sainte Eulalie et Sainte Julie and the Episcopal Palace (the catholic bishopric was established in the 6th century and wasn’t transferred to Perpignan until 1601) and for those not interested in ecclesiastical buildings (Vanya) there is a butterfly farm (Le Tropique du Papillon) which we didn’t get to enjoy because we had our dogs with us. I imagine that the last thing anyone wants to see, least of all Vanya, is Beanie tearing around the Mediterranean Garden, hounding rare butterflies to death.
No, I made do with a short tour of the cathedral and it’s cloisters and then we wandered the town admiring the artwork of the sculptor Aristide Maillol (whom I wrote about when we visited Banyuls sur Mer), a painter called Etienne Terrus (whom I had never heard of but who became a highly regarded impressionist painter and was a close friend of Henri Matisse) and a number of contemporary artists who, no doubt influenced by Terrus, have made Elne their home (for the time being at least).
The cathedral dominates the town and is impressive. Parts of the current building date back to 1069 but most of the Cathedral was destroyed (and the town’s population massacred) in 1285 when a French army invaded Catalan as part of the Aragonese Crusade.It was rebuilt in the 14th century.
One of the statues in Elne which is easily identified as a Malliol creation is the war memorial honouring the town’s fallen in the two world wars, and France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria. The model for the statue was Dina Vierny (the muse, model, avid art collector and member of the French resistance during WW2 whom I wrote about in my blog on Banyuls sur Mer). She was the model too for his Pomone which is in the Tuileries in Paris. She wisely kept her clothes on for Elne’s war memorial.
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A great many of the works of Etienne Terrus are to be found in Elne’s Terrus Museum & Art Gallery although the numbers were reduced quite considerably between September 2017 and April 2018. In September 2017, a guest curator became suspicious about some of the exhibits on display in the museum and reported the matter, suggesting they were fakes. 82 of the 142 works on display were later found to be fakes. The 60 works now on display in the gallery were authenticated and ‘Elne, les ramparts sud’ is amongst them.
There are plenty of other works on display in the streets around the town and I took a few photographs but…
… Sometimes it is the streets themselves that produce the real beauty:-
We’re staying on in Le Brasilia for at least another two days and so tomorrow I will visit Sainte Marie-Marie La Mere…