Most people who hire a boat in the south of France pick one waterway and stick to it. We wanted two. The Canal du Midi has the plane trees and the postcard locks, but it ends in a lagoon, and just across that lagoon and along a flat brown canal lies the Camargue, the wild river-delta of horses, flamingos and salt. Linking the two gave us a fortnight of cruising that swung from manicured to genuinely wild, and showed a side of the French inland network that the brochures tend to skip.
Two waterways, one plan
The combo works because the waterways physically connect. The Canal du Midi runs 240km from Toulouse down to the Etang de Thau, the big sheltered lagoon behind Sete. From the Thau you slip onto the Canal du Rhone a Sete, which runs 69km with no locks at all from Sete up to Saint-Gilles, skirting the Camargue the whole way. From there the Petit Rhone offers another 20km of cruising into the delta proper. We did the eastern half of the Midi, crossed the Thau, and ran up into the Camargue, then turned and came back.
If you are new to the Midi as a thing in its own right, the Canal du Midi by boat overview is the place to start, and the Canal du Midi one week itinerary covers the classic shorter trip if a fortnight is more than you have.
The locks, and learning to love them
The Midi is defined by its locks. The full canal carries 63 of them between Toulouse and the Thau, a mix of 45 singles, 12 doubles, 4 triples and a famous quadruple, plus the staircase at Fonseranes that originally had eight chambers crossing 21 metres of height in 315 metres of length. Most are the distinctive oval shape, built that way in the 17th century to resist the pressure of the earth banks. If you have never worked one, read how a French lock works before you go, because the first few are clumsy and the queues in season test your patience.
We crewed it the sensible way: one on the helm, one ashore with the lines, fenders out, no rushing. The lock-keepers run the chambers and are mostly cheerful if you do not hold them up. By the third day the locks had stopped being an event and become a rhythm.
A few practical lock habits made the trip smoother. Rig long warps fore and aft and keep them tended rather than cleated, because the turbulence as a chamber fills can throw a boat about and a fixed line snaps something. Wear gloves. Approach slowly and let the keeper wave you in rather than barging. And in high season, expect to share the chamber and to wait, sometimes a long time, behind the hire-boat flotillas. The locks generally close for a long lunch and stop running in the early evening, so you cruise to their hours, not yours, and plan your overnight stop within reach of a closed lock rather than gambling on getting through.
The staircase at Fonseranes, then Beziers
The set-piece of the eastern Midi is the Fonseranes staircase just outside Beziers, the biggest in France. A boat heading for the Thau today passes through six of its chambers, climbing or dropping the better part of 20 metres in a single graceful flight. We tied up below it, walked up to watch a hire boat ahead of us being lifted chamber by chamber, then took our turn. Beziers itself sits on a hill above, worth a wander, and from the water the great aqueduct that carries the canal over the river Orb is a quietly astonishing piece of engineering.
Across the Thau to the Camargue
The Etang de Thau is the hinge of the trip. It is a proper inland sea, oyster-farmed and open enough to kick up a chop in a blow, so we crossed it in the calm of early morning rather than fighting wind against the boat. Sete, at the seaward end, is a working fishing port with canals running through it and a character entirely its own. The Sete Languedoc coast notes cover the town, which makes a fine stop and a chance to eat the oysters you have been motoring past for three days.
From Sete the Canal du Rhone a Sete strikes east toward the Camargue, dead flat and lock-free for its 69km. The banks are high and the views often hidden, but you are heading somewhere wilder, and the prospect carried us along.
Into the wild: the Camargue afloat
The Camargue is the payoff. The canal borders the delta and crosses great salt lagoons, and although the high banks sometimes block the view, you climb to the cabin top and there it is: flat marsh to the horizon, white horses, pink flamingos standing in the shallows. Seeing the Camargue from the water is a different experience from the tourist road tours, quieter and slower, and the wildlife treats a drifting boat as part of the scenery.
The delta is one of the great wetlands of Europe, a mosaic of salt pans, rice paddies and brackish lagoons that supports the only breeding flamingo colony in France along with thousands of other wading birds. From a slow boat at dawn the place comes alive in a way no coach tour catches. We saw flamingos by the hundred, herons stalking the margins, and the famous white Camargue horses grazing right to the waterline. The black bulls raised here for the bullrings are a working part of the landscape too, and you pass the manades, the cattle ranches, strung along the higher ground. Anchoring or mooring overnight in the delta and waking to that soundscape of birds is the kind of thing you remember years later.
We turned up the Petit Rhone for a stretch, which winds 20km into the delta to a short cut and a surprisingly large lock onto the canal system. The whole region rewards the boat that slows down. We anchored where we could, walked the towpaths at dusk, and watched flamingos lift off the lagoons in long pink lines. The wider Camargue Gulf of Lion crossing piece covers the seaward side if you ever want to do the delta by coast instead.
Paperwork, dimensions and the practical bits
A few things to sort before you cast off. You need a VNF licence to use the French waterways, and the VNF vignette French waterways guide explains the toll and how to buy it. Hire boats usually come with this arranged; an own boat does not. You also need the right paperwork to drive, which for visitors usually means the CEVNI ICC licence French waterways endorsement, the inland equivalent of an ICC.
Dimensions matter on the Midi. The canal was built to the old Freycinet gauge and the air draft is limited, so anything tall will not fit under the bridges. The air draft French canals notes are the ones to check if you are bringing your own boat rather than hiring, and the freycinet gauge canal dimensions piece spells out the lock sizes. For a hire boat none of this is your problem; for an own boat it is the whole problem.
What the combo gives you
Over a fortnight we covered perhaps half the Midi and a good stretch of the Camargue, worked dozens of locks, crossed a lagoon, and ended up among flamingos. The contrast is the point: the ordered, plane-shaded Midi at one end, the raw delta at the other, joined by a flat ditch that nobody photographs.
Three honest tips. Cruise in May, June or September rather than peak August, when the locks queue and the heat is fierce. Take it slow through the Camargue and climb the cabin top, because the best of it hides behind the banks. And sort the licence and the boat dimensions before you go, because a Midi cruise stopped dead by a bridge two metres too low is the saddest sight on the canal. Do it right and you get two trips for the price of one, and a fortnight that swings from postcard to wilderness and back.
