The Birth of cottages
Around the first villages of Sormiou or Morgiou, essentially made up of fishermen’s cabins, emerged heteroclite constructions. They are small huts usually deprived of electricity and water but whose common factor is warmth, conviviality and returning to their roots. Despite their simple appearance, these sheds use various materials construction such as dry stones, mortar, clay, sand, … Nowadays, these cottages are sometimes transformed into pretty seaside villas.
Life in the cottage
As life in the bastide, life in a cottage is a true lifestyle. Attached to the essential, life in the cottage is above all the privilege of living a life in entire liberty close to nature. As a place of refuge for the little people, they would gather on Sundays and days of celebration to find each other in the hut.meet in the cottage. “Bouillabaisse”, “aïoli”, “pétanque”, card game, and naps are the rhythm of life in cottage!
Under the arbors, you can hear the clinging of glasses filled with pastis on a background of cicadas, the smell of sardinades or grilled fish, kids in the water, and a few bathers cohabiting with the passage of walkers on their way to the hikes…
Life in a hut is a mixture of genres, smells, sensations, in a heavenly universe right next to the ‘Vieux-Port’ (old-port). A little corner of paradise that we need to protect with the help of the actions of the National Park of the Calanques and of the owners of these cottages that watch over this beautiful image of happiness.
The ‘cabanonnier’ (that is the name of the cottage owners) will tell you, bantering: in the hut, there is nothing else to do but to be as happy as possible. Being in the cottage is a chance and a celebration.
One practices day to day the “art of life” in Marseille, alone or with others, by devoting oneself to bits of tasks that one likes to enumerate in front of the visitor. Nothing tedious, nothing constrained should weigh on the activities of the cabin; all are equally necessary; one exercises there like Robinson or Sitting Bull, with the same happiness, all the trades. Listen to the shack dwellers, they are never bored: “There is always something to do”, you hear like a refrain.
These corners of paradise cannot be bought, they are passed on from father to son and from generation to generation!
