Some 28km southeast of Montpellier, twenty minutes away by train, SÈTE has been an important port for three hundred years. Searching for a Sète hotelthis website has a lot of choices. The upper part of the town straddles the slopes of the Mont St-Clair, which overlooks the vast Bassin de Thau, breeding ground of mussels and Oysters, while the lower part is intersected by waterways lined with tall terraces and seafood restaurants. It has a lively workaday bustle in addition to its tourist activity, at its height during the summer joutes nautiques (waterjousting).The crowded and vibrant pedestrian streets are scattered with café tables. A short climb up from the harbour is the cimetière marin, the sailors' cemetery, where poet Paul Valéry is buried. A native of the town, he called Sète his "singular island", and the Musée Paul Valéry, in rue Denoyer (July & Aug daily 10am-6pm; Sept–June Wed–Mon 10am–noon & 2–6pm; €3.05), opposite the cemetery, has a room devoted to him, as well as a small but strong collection of modern French paintings. If you're feeling energetic, you should keep going up the hill, through the pines to the top, for a view that's fabulous when it's not engulfed in sea mist. Below the sailors' cemetery, and neatly poised above the water, is Vauban's Fort St-Pierre, now home to an open-air theatre. Over on the west side of the hill, George Brassens, associate of Sartre and the radical voice of a whole French generation, is buried in the Cimetière le Py, in spite of his song Plea to be Buried on the Beach at Sète. In Éspace Brassens (July & Aug daily 10am–noon & 2–6pm; Sept–June Tues–Sun 10am–noon & 2–6pm; €10.53), overlooking the cemetery, the locally born singer-songwriter lives again through his words and music, narrating his life-story in French on the museum's headsets.
Pages in section ‘Sète’: Practicalities.
Alternate spellings:: France, Sète, Sète, Sete
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