The Fable of the Remarkable Natural Area
Under the leaden sun crushing the Maures, the cicadas' song doesn't drown out an injustice. On the Côte d'Azur, the promised land sometimes has...
On this hill that was meant to be their paradise, fifty-five owners powerlessly contemplate the ruin of a lifetime of savings, sacrificed on the altar of a versatile administration. We walk with difficulty through the underbrush, pushing aside the thorny branches of wild mimosas that scratch our clothes. The air is heavy, saturated with the smell of resin and hot dust. In front of us, a man stops, short of breath but his eyes burning with a cold anger. He plants his cane into the dry, cracked ground. 'It's here,' he whispers, his voice broken with emotion. 'It's here that I was supposed to end my days.' We are on plot number 74. Around us, there is only wasteland, desolation, and the specter of a ghost neighborhood. The man, born in 1946, pulls a cardboard folder yellowed by time from his pocket. He extracts a notarized deed dated March 20, 1991. Thirty-five years. A lifetime. At the time, this piece of land in Rayol-Canadelsur-Mer represented the culmination of a lifetime of labor, the promise of an inheritance to pass on. Today, this official paper is worth no more than the dead leaves littering the ground.
THE CEMETERY OF BURIED AMBITIONS
What is striking, when walking through this locality known as 'La Tessonnière', is the indelible and absurd trace of man. For we are not in a virgin forest, far from it. Beneath our feet, buried like the vestiges of a vanished civilization, sleep millions of francs of investments.
The asphalt of the road, although cracked in places, is still there. We walk past red fire hydrants, incongruous totems standing in the middle of the maquis, perfectly functional, waiting for a fire that will – hopefully – never come to lick the walls of villas that do not exist. 'The land they acquired has lost all exchange value. It is a de facto dispossession.' 'Look at this,' says the lawyer representing these fifty-five disinherited owners, pointing to a ground plate. 'Everything is there. Water, electricity, main sewage. The networks are sized for 80 villas. They even serve to supply the rest of the municipality!' The irony is biting. The electric cables running through the subsoil of these cursed plots power the town hall, which today refuses to issue building permits. If the power were cut here, the local administration would find itself in the dark. It is a French administrative paradox in all its glory: an urban zone (ZAC) created in 1988, serviced at great expense, sold to trusting citizens, and then brutally wiped off the map of possibilities by a succession of court decisions and political turnabouts. We continue our ascent toward the ridge. The landscape alternates between barren areas, illegal dumping of rubble – sad witnesses of abandonment – and impenetrable thickets. Yet, on paper, we are crossing a sanctuary.