Chambres Hote Lalinde

The Dordogne and Vezere rivers are a delight for canoeing. From narrow gorges to lazy wide sections there is an excellent choice of places to hire a canoe and enjoy the scenery. My favourite is to drive just south of Beynac Chateau, park your car and sign up for a canoe and be driven to Vitrac above Domme and enjoy a leisurely 15km / 3 hours drifting down the Dordogne passing massive castles, cave dwellings, beautiful stone bridges and charming golden stoned villages. Pull over for a picnic, have a swim, just enjoy the fabulous scenery and you end up where you started and parked your car.

Lalinde has it’s own canoe company (Azul) that takes you to Mauzac above Lalinde and you can enjoy a lazy 2 hours enjoying the river and views ending back in Lalinde with a 5 minute walk back to Maison Porte del Marty. Just one word of warning, the mornings are probably a better time to go canoeing as it can get very hot in the afternoon and it’s easy for fair skinned people to get grilled. We have a selection of brochures at Maison Porte del Marty that offer wide choices of canoe trips, there is something to suit every age group. For the nervous, the wide Canadian canoes are almost unsinkable and very difficult to capsize. You will be supplied with lifejackets and some plastic drums to put your personal things in, with the river flowing towards your destination, you can paddle furiously or just drift using the paddles to control your direction.

Coming from New Zealand, there are many birds in Lalinde that I’m not familiar with. It was only a passionate twitcher guest and his enthusiasm for the many birds he was able to view, both on land and water from our region that encouraged me to do some basic research. This link following will give you some idea of the variety living in or travelling through the Dordogne Valley https://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/checklist.jsp?region=FRaq24

From the window of your room there is wide selection of river birds including (season dependent) cranes, stilts, egrets, cormorants, oyster catchers, geese, swans…..the evening sky is full of house and crag martins, swifts and sometimes swallows. Our surrounding forests are well populated with cuckoos, wood peckers, nightjar, hoopoe, warblers, tits, golden oriole and with so much open country falcons, kites, buzzards and sparrow hawks are a regular part of our scenery. If you wanted to mix some bird watching with enjoying a beautiful part of France, consider Maison Porte del Marty as a place to home base. Our surrounding rivers and wetlands also support a wide variety of dragon flies, their vibrant colours on a hot bucolic day are such a treat to watch.