Fingers crossed at France's brasseries and cafes
as tourist quarantines loom
The
Observer
France
Numbers of foreign visitors are already down – and the
fresh surge of Covid cases could spell the end for the holiday season
Phil Hoad
@phlode
Sat 8 Aug
2020 20.15 BSTLast modified on Sat 8 Aug 2020 21.56 BST
In a normal
August, the much-loved miniature tourist train in the French port city of Sète
would be full of tourists from Britain and elsewhere, enjoying the ride.
Optimistically,
the manager, Romiy Priore, took steps to make his attraction safe for Covid
times. “With the virus, we decided to order disposable earphones for the start
of the season on 23 June – 100 of them,” he says, huddling behind a Perspex
screen in a cool cabin on the quayside. “It’s August, and I still have 70 left.
That tells you how many foreign tourists we currently have.”
Priore,
whose parents own the business, says that with takings down by around half
overall, they may struggle to pay the company’s three full-time employees for
the rest of the year. This week, along with tens of thousands of other
businesses, he will be keeping his fingers crossed that the news from Britain
is good.
With French
coronavirus cases accelerating quickly – 2,288 were reported on Friday, a steep
rise from Thursday’s 1,604, following a 33% week-on-week increase between 27
July and 2 August – attempts to resuscitate the tourist sector are now under
threat.
As the
French health ministry warned last week that the country could lose control of
the virus “at any time”, the chancellor Rishi Sunak said the government “would
not hesitate” to add France to its quarantine list should the situation
deteriorate. On Thursday, Norway imposed a 10-day quarantine for arrivals from
France; much more of this and the French holiday season could be dead before it
has got going.
At Sète’s
Grand Hotel, the receptionist Olivier Hernandez says he has already received
several cancellations from prospective English guests. Restaurateurs dishing
out oyster platters in the market halls report takings are down by 30%.
The new
Covid-19 surge is already having its effect. Further along the Mediterranean
coast, Marseille announced on Friday that mask-wearing would be compulsory in
the old port quarter between 10am and 4am, following the imposition of similar
measures in parts of Nice and St Tropez earlier last week.
Twenty
miles away in the city of Montpellier, half the tables at cafes on Place de la
Comédie, its main square, are empty. Laurent Lechuga, owner of Les Trois Graces
brasserie, has had to make up the slack by opening an outdoors stand selling
coffees and ice cream. He thinks a new UK quarantine on arrivals from France
would be a mistake: “You will close your main gateway to Europe.”
Round the
corner at Montpellier’s flagship gallery, the Musée Fabre, Mark – a British
citizen who works there as a security guard – jokes: “The only good thing about
Covid is that no one talks about Brexit any more.”
He agrees
with further quarantines, although only “if the British economy can stand it”.
Ron
Johnstone, a British writer at a nearby cafe terrace, is also philosophical,
although post-lockdown he had to wait until July – when the blanket quarantine
was lifted – to return to the UK. “What has to be done has to be done,” he
says, pointing out there are more than 280 clusters under observation in France.
France, the
world’s most popular tourist destination, faces huge losses without the foreign
visitors who spent €57.9bn (£52.2bn) there last year, according to the national
tourist development agency. The south-west Occitanie region also stands to lose
heavily: with 14.3% of all overnight stays in France, it is the country’s third
most visited area.
Figures
released last week by Hérault Tourisme, the département where Montpellier and
Sète are situated, showed that eight out of 10 tourist establishments reported
reduced trade in June compared with the previous year.
Sète,
hymned in song by the French musician Georges Brassens and on film by the
directors Abdellatif Kechiche and Agnès Varda, has been building a more
international tourist base in recent years.
But that
all juddered to a halt earlier this year: the city’s new cruise-ship season,
which only began in 2016 and brought in 115,000 passengers last year, was
cancelled outright. So was the British DJ Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide festival,
an increasingly significant fixture on the international music circuit. Other
summer festivals, including Jazz à Sète and August’s Saint-Louis celebrations –
which feature traditional water-jousting battles – have also been cancelled or
scaled down.
In the
absence of foreign income, domestic tourists have at least filled the gap, says
Madeleine Isola, from Sète’s tourist office: “The season was slow to start, but
once it did it exploded.” French visitors do, though, spend less than foreign
ones, she says.
Down on the
quayside, the boat tour operators report they are running at full capacity –
though with “very few” foreigners. On the seafront, the ravelins of Théâtre de
la Mer, a former 18th-century fort, are deserted – it has been repurposed as an
outdoor cinema, which is apparently doing well. Barman Eric Bouteille, shucking
oysters with a knife at the adjacent cafe, is determined to look on the bright
side: “I think other regions have had it worse. We’ll get through it.” .
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