LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 40

hind grimy buildings and abandoned warehouses. My French friends warned me against
traveling there for anything but the wine. The city was a wreck.
Then Alain Juppé became mayor of Bordeaux in 1995 and he transformed the city. It
was by-the-book planning, all bottom-up, with local officials deciding what to save, what
to raze, what the city could support, what was beyond its means or desires. Then the city
coordinated the plans with the regional, national and European authorities, who approved
them and then paid a good share of the costs. It took more than ten long years.
Mayor Juppé's plan was simple, which made it all the more difficult. Return the town
to its breathtaking eighteenth-century beauty by ordering the owners of historic buildings
to follow the law passed by Malraux and clean off the dirt that had caked the façades since
the industrial era. Scrubbing off the grime revealed an almost golden sheen to this rare
urban masterpiece. Then he attacked the industrial wasteland of abandoned warehouses
that lined the river port and cut the city off from the beautiful Gironde. The warehouses
were pulled down and replaced by a riverside park designed by Claire and Michel Cora-
joud, top French landscape architects. The quai became a promenade with gardens, paths
and in the center a long shallow reflecting pool or “water mirror” to catch the light from
the sky and reflect the old eighteenth-century bourse, or stock exchange.
Finally, Juppé built a modern tramway system that eliminates unnecessary driving and
opens up the old city to pedestrians again with public squares, green spaces and car-free
walkways.
For Bordeaux, this was the equivalent of the Boston Big Dig. For French tourism offi-
cials, it was the Big Payoff. From the beginning, they had watched and fostered the renais-
sance of Bordeaux, promoting this “sleeping beauty” as returned to the living and figuring
out how Bordeaux could add new glamour to the French tourist agenda.
During our trip to France, Bill and I caught a rapid train from Paris and in less than
three hours arrived at Bordeaux, in the southwest corner of France near the Atlantic
Ocean, the Pyrenees Mountains and a little farther to the east, the Mediterranean.
Our first day in Bordeaux we were bowled over; once again it was the city Victor Hugo
had described as a cross between commercial Antwerp and elegant Paris, but without the
capital's crowds or high prices.
To avoid a full blast of propaganda from the city's tourist office, we went first to the
vineyards, to ask the old families what they thought about this new transformation and the
tourism that followed, whether they felt as if their city had sold out to the tourism gods.
Château Haut-Bailly is one of the region's finest wineries, producing Graves Crus
Classés. The château sits on a high ridge just south of the city of Bordeaux, surrounded by
vineyards that are four centuries old. Véronique Sanders is the manager, and she said the
wine is in such demand these days that it takes her a mere twenty minutes to sell her en-
tire annual production—about 160,000 bottles. England, which ruled the region for three