The Telegraph reports on a British couple in Provence selling their snail business - a boutique hotel would you believe! Read the extract ....
The hotel, nine miles from Avignon, is set in four acres of landscaped gardens and is on the market for €2.45 million (£2.1m).
"Running the hotel and farm has been very enjoyable. It'd be wonderful if other Britons wanted to follow the path I've carved," said Mrs Parkes.
The sales particulars for the property, Les Carmes, lists its seven suites, inner courtyard for al fresco dining and its swimming pool in glowing terms before adding - almost as an afterthought - "and a working snail farm."
French consumers eat an estimated 35,000 ton of snails a year, according to the French snail producers' union. But only around 1,500 tons of those are produced in France, with the rest imported from eastern Europe, where they are picked in the wild.
There are only 200 professional snail farmers in France and to qualify as one of them, Mrs Parkes spent three months studying snails' reproductive cycles, the grains on which to feed them, and how to set up an electrically-fenced enclosure.
No comments:
Post a Comment