Olive mill in VilleVieille, Plage de L'Espiguette and a night market in Sommieres.

Today was Gordon’s birthday.  We started it with a trip to a local olive cooperative in Villevielle where we were shown all the steps of the process for making oil from raw olives brought in by local people, some of whom only had a handful of trees.  It was interesting also to see the different methods of harvesting olives that are in practice, from picking by hand to fully automated tree-shaking and olive-catching.

After this visit we drove down to Plage de l’Espiguette – it is a huge beach and really well kept.  The sand was clean (and hot) and we had a few hours there including several cooling swims in the sea.

As today was our last full day in Sommieres we decided to have dinner at Chez Tybere, a restaurant recommended by the hotel.  It didn’t disappoint us and we enjoyed seeing a friendly cat there too.