Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing year construction work began on a 100-sq-
km petrochemical zone and an industrial port
at Fos-sur-Mer, southern Europe's most im-
portant. The first metro line opened in Mar-
seille in 1977 and TGV high-speed trains
reached the city in 1981.
From the 1970s mainstream tourism started making inroads into Provence's rural heart.
Concrete blocks sprang up along the coast and up on the ski slopes. The small flow of for-
eigners that had trickled into Provence backwaters to buy crumbling old
mas
(Provençal
farmhouses) in the late 1970s had become an uncontrollable torrent by the 1980s. By the
turn of the new millennium, the region was welcoming nine million tourists annually.
French people are known in France) flooded into
France, with the majority settling in the south.
NICE TREATY
No pan-European agreement has been more influential on the future map of Europe than the Treaty of Nice, a
landmark treaty thrashed out by the then 15 European Union member states in late December 2000. Enforced
from February 2003, the treaty laid the foundations for EU enlargement starting in 2004, determined the institu-
tions necessary for its smooth running and - not without controversy - established a new system of voting in the
Council of Ministers for the 25 EU countries from 1 November 2004.
Corruption, the Mafia & the Front National
Writer Somerset Maugham had famously described Monaco as 'a sunny place for shady
people' but over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, many increasingly felt that this could
apply to the region as a whole. Although it was well known that the Italian, Russian and
Corsican mafias all operated on the coast, their true extent was revealed after a series of
corruption scandals, none more dramatic than the assassination of
député
(member of par-
liament) Yann Piat in 1994: she was shot in her Hyères constituency following her public
denunciation of the Riviera mafia.
The same year, former Nice mayor Jacques
Médecin, who had run the city from 1966 to
1990, was found guilty of income-tax evasion
and misuse of public funds after being extra-
dited from Uruguay where he'd fled. And in
1995, Bernard Tapie, the flamboyant owner of
Sophia-Antipolis, the French version of Silicon
Valley near Antibes, was created in 1969. It em-
ploys more than 30,000 people in four areas: in-
