When we were deciding where in France to settle, I can’t say that being eco-friendly was on our list of criteria for finding a new home. Now that Carcassonne has been recognized as the country’s greenest city according to a magazine’s survey, naturally we’re proud and delighted to be living here. The weekly national news publication, L’Express, examined the 118 urban areas (agglomérations) with a population of more than 100,000 in five major categories. The southern part of the country did well in general with other cities coming in at #2-Pau, #3-Narbonne, #5-Agen, and #7-Nîmes for Ecology. I wanted to find out more when I read in the paper that our mayor had said, “First of all, I must say that I was both surprised and pleased to see these results.”

I knew that our community has been making efforts for years to improve the environment and we’ve talked about some of them on this blog. The city participates in Objectif Zéro Phyto that eliminates the use of pesticides and insecticides, replacing them with beehives, insect hotels, and goats and sheep to clear the pathways along the river. We’ve seen an increase in the number of bike paths, the creation of a hydro-electric plant at an existing  flood prevention dam, and numerous installations of solar panels on city-owned properties. The mayor said to expect some buildings in the Bastide (downtown) to be covered with climbing plants, and enough trees planted on squares and along streets to create “a forest in the city”. For L’Express, the reasons were simply because Carcassonne has, “excellent air quality, very little polluted soil, and high levels of wind and solar energy production.”

But the good news doesn’t stop there. Carcassonne made it into the top 10 for the category “Family”. The magazine put the city at the #9 position because of its “offerings of education and higher ed, health care, distance to the coast and to the mountains, and property prices”. Interestingly, the urban area of Tarbes-Lourdes made it to the top spot of “Family” for two of those same reasons: affordable property prices and proximity to the mountains.

You would need a subscription (that we don’t have) to L’Express to read the entire article and to discover how other cities fared in the remaining key categories. Unsurprisingly, I saw in another newspaper article that Paris was number 1 for culture and for technology. If you’re searching for that ideal place in France to call “home”, the tag in the right hand column, Where To Live in France, will take you to our posts about other surveys on this topic. That original list I mentioned in the first paragraph included having a weekly market, a train station, and being within walking distance of shops, a supermarket, and medical facilities. Now we feel like it’s a bonus to know that we’ll be breathing fresh air while we’re doing all of that walking!

Photo notes: The featured photo across the top of this post is the walking path along the Canal-du-Midi and in the first paragraph is in the Jardin des Plantes. Both locations are near the train station in Carcassonne.