Sara Damergi heads to Poitou-Charentes in the west of France to help house hunters Jules and Gaynor. Along with their pet alpacas, they are planning a permanent move to rural France to run their own gite business. Sara shows them the best of what their £250,000 budget gets them with five fantastic properties but will any of them be the perfect place for Jules and Gaynor?
About the area
Poitou-Charentes in western France is about 7 hours drive from Calais, or if you’re flying, the airports in La Rochelle, Limoges, and Bordeaux, take around 2 hours to get to from the UK–all of these airports are around an hour and a half drive from the area. Poitou-Charentes is one of France’s most rural and agricultural areas, known for producing vegetables, cheese and most notably the grapes that make Cognac.
Its western edge runs along the Atlantic coast and it gets the second half of its name from the river Charente that runs all the way through it. We’re focusing our search in the east of the region in the countryside between Poitiers and Angouleme, its two biggest cities.