The Tarn is at the heart of the Occitanie region. It's a department with an unspoilt natural environment and an atypical historical and cultural background. Starting from the gîte "La Pomarède", in Ambres, I invite you to discover some of its facets. Closest to home is Lavaur (3km), a small town of 10,000 inhabitants with a prestigious and tragic past. Yesterday, a bastion of Catharism, the town was almost destroyed in 1211 by Simon de Montfort during the Albigensian Crusade. The lord of the town, Dame Guiraude de Laurac, was thrown alive into a well and stoned to death along with 80 of her knights. A stone still preserves the memory of the tragedy. Today, Lavaur is also the only town in south-west France to have a Jacquemart. This is a wooden automaton that strikes one of the bells of Saint Alain Cathedral every hour and half-hour. It has a rather unusual history and is well worth knowing. The cathedral, built in the 13th century, is a major work of Gothic architecture in the region. It is a sister to the cathedral of Sainte Cécile in Albi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are dozens of other things you could discover about Lavaur, its markets, its festivals and fairs, its culinary traditions and so on... If you draw a circle of about thirty kilometres around Ambres on a map, you'll find the towns of Toulouse, Albi, Castres, Vaour, Cordes and Lautrec. All of them have dozens of stories to tell. At Revel, you'll also come across the Way of Saint James, via the Arles route. Crossing Toulouse along the route is an astonishing and unforgettable experience. A second 60 km circle will take us to the Monts de Lacaune and the Haut Languedoc nature park, passing through the Sidobre (a granite massif unique in Europe), populated by rocks with enigmatic shapes (Roc de l'oie, Rocher tremblant, Chaos de la Balme, Lac du merle)... A little to the right, we come to the "black mountain", whose dense forest [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/For%C3%AAt] seems to be the origin of its name. The Pic de Nore peaks at 1211m; the northern foothills are in the Tarn département and the southern slopes are in the Aude département. On a clear day, you can see the Mediterranean and the medieval town of Carcassonne. I won't go any further than that, because we won't be talking about Narbonne (the magnificent Roman city), just a little further away, or the ever-wild Pyrenees, or Aveyron, or Ariège... There are magnificent gardens, exceptional potters, artists of all kinds, forests, breathtaking vistas, crystal-clear lakes, rivers with no return... a living palette, constantly renewed, that makes our region so special and unique. We call it the Land of plenty.