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According to a survey conducted by French news magazine L’Express, the Languedoc-Roussillon département of Aude offers the very best quality of life for older folk or “les seniors”, as they are known in French.
Not only does Aude come out on top, but the four other départements that make up the Languedoc-Roussillon region – namely Gard, Lozère, Hérault and Pyrénées-Orientales – were considered to offer a very high standard of quality of life, coming joint 8th (Gard and Lozère), 5th and 4th respectively.
Languedoc-Roussillon’s five departments all ranked within “quality of life” top ten, thanks to, amongst other criteria, their reasonably-priced property, clement climate and low crime rate.
The survey, published at the end of 2007, looked at all of France’s départements and ranked them against a raft of criteria considered important to senior citizens.
For the “quality of life” ranking, the judging criteria included proximity to coast and mountains, cost of accommodation, average temperatures, number of days of rain per annum, crime rate and cultural rating.
Being based in the Languedoc region, the Crème de Languedoc founders are well-placed to attest to the survey’s findings, and although we’re not quite ready to retire ourselves, our respective sets of parents have chosen to live out their retirement here – a decision we can only applaud, and which is now borne out by the Express survey.
Summing up the call of the sea and the south of France, the survey’s author writes: “What do you look for when you retire? A calm, safe environment, a clement climate, reasonably-priced accommodation within a region that is not a cultural desert, with, if possible, the sea or the mountains nearby…. Aude comes out on top.”
Besides its well-publicised attractions (proximity to the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Carcassonne and the Canal du Midi, for example), Aude has another card to play: its property prices are very accessible.
According to French estate agent Nadia Ikov, based in the Aude city of Carcassonne, Languedoc house hunters can expect to pay an average of €1,500 per square metre for a top-of-the-range apartment in the very centre of town. A character house with garage and around 90 square metres of living space (roughly, a two bed home) starts from around €200,000. The fact that land here is very modestly priced means that for around €180,000 (and reduced notaires’ fees) you can buy a plot and build your very own Languedoc home.
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