Last year alone, 3 million visitors made their way to
Sarlat. When I first came to the region in early 2009, the statistics were just
in for 2008 that announced nearly 2 million visitors. Just two years later, the
new count was around 2.5 million. With a steady increase of half a million
visitors every year or two, most are making their way to take in ‘one of
France’s most beautiful markets’ right now.
That’s a lot of people coming to a place about which most
people still have not heard. Unless, of course, you are a lover of the most beautiful
French markets, of prehistory and painted caves, and of so many castles and
chateaus waving to you from a riverside cliff top or from a rise in a misty
forest valley with turrets and towers piercing the fog, then, it’s a serious
destination.
I first came here in January, seeking a time of solitude—and
lower prices, and more time to talk to locals, and to learn Occitan, the old
Romance language of these hills once sung far and wide by the troubadours. I
wanted also, in the calm of deep winter, to see the painted caves of the Magdalenians
who lived around 18,000 to 12,000 years ago and left us Lascaux and to see
places where Neandertals long before them, anywhere from around 380,000 years
ago to 40,000 years ago, camped, hunted and gathered and made their life. It
was during the quietest edge of visits and so I was in initial shock when I came
back for a visit my first summer here and experienced the rush and throng of
people in the peak season. 
What was a quiet winter food market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, setting
up slowly in the dark morning, sunrise still an hour or two away, merchants
wrapped in their fleece and parkas and taking an early breakfast together at
one of their tables, rested in spite of the 5 am hour, in summer, they arrived
at the same hour but in daylight and seemed a bit worn at the edges but still
cheerful and ready to engage in the parade of life—food and people, dogs and
conversations, and if they could, steal a bite in what was no longer an early
lingering breakfast but a peripatetic bite.
As much as I miss those quiet winter markets in the busy
tourist season, I love the color and comedy of the market in summer. Winter had
its spinach and squashes but summer has its strawberries, first arriving in
spring, then its cherries and plums and peaches and apricots along with its
sun-bursting ripe tomatoes of all colors and sizes, then its blackberries, and
only in August do we begin to see the edges of autumn pushing in with early gourd
squash and late zucchini. The
palette shifts from grey and green to red, yellow and orange. The bold summer
colors pierce through the thick hot air, unless it rains, which it can any time
for any reason, whatever the season.
Like the crowds that run currents through Sarlat’s market,
so the rivers swell and overflow their banks and announce that this too is
life, the feast along with the famine, the summer chaos after the winter calm.
I love it all.
I marvel also at how, no matter the mood or demands of the market,
the merchants remain steady, kind, warm, and generous people. The personality
of Sarlat’s weekly market holds as a place where people savor life and share of
its beauty without restraint, inviting everyone in. Including the dogs who you
will see pushing their shoulders between peoples’ legs, insisting on being a
part of the parade of life. (Be sure to see my post on the dogs of southern France, important citizens, indeed!) 
And sunflowers. How could one overlook this distinct sign of
summer, their peak arriving in July and their heavy, seed-packed heads
beginning to droop and dry by mid-August? That is when you really know you are
in the south of France in summer with one of its iconic delights. Here in the
Dordogne, they make a special appearance just west of Sarlat, around the church
of Vezac in the valley below the fortified castle of Beynac along the
Dordogne river, the old 12th century Romanesque church making a lyrical
backdrop to the splash of yellow across the horizon.
Also near Vezac’s church, and all across the region, walnut
trees are beginning to drop their nuts. This ever-present produce of the
Dordogne is always on hand in the market—winter, spring, summer and fall—and in its many forms: natural in the shell, toasted golden pressed oil, or in the form
of the famous walnut cake made from both the nut and the oil.
Soon enough, the summer harvests will come in, the fig trees will swell with fruit and drop it on the garden path and roadside, school will
start, and somewhere a shoulder of a new shoulder season will appear, most
likely in late October these days, just in time for chestnuts to appear in the
surrounding forests and in the market in Sarlat.
