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Provence is a geographical region and historical province of southeastern France, which extends from the left bank of the lower Rhône to the west to the Italian border to the east; it is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the south. It largely corresponds with the modern administrative region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and includes the departments of Var, Bouches-du-Rhône, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, as well as parts of Alpes-Maritimes and Vaucluse. The largest city of the region and its modern-day capital is Marseille.
Toulon is a city on the French Riviera and a large port on the Mediterranean coast, with a major naval base. Located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, and the Provence province, Toulon is the prefecture of the Var department.
The geography of France consists of a terrain that is mostly flat plains or gently rolling hills in the north and west and mountainous in the south and the east. Metropolitan France has a total size of 551,695 km2 (213,011 sq mi). It is the third largest country in Europe by area and the largest in Western Europe.
Bouches-du-Rhône is a department in southern France. It borders Vaucluse to the north, Gard to the west and Var to the east. The Mediterranean Sea lies to the south. Its prefecture and largest city is Marseille; other important cities include Aix-en-Provence, Arles, Martigues and Aubagne.
Aude is a department in Southern France, located in the Occitanie region and named after the river Aude. The departmental council also calls it "Cathar Country" after a group of religious dissidents active in the 12th to 14th centuries.
Tarn is a department in the Occitania region in Southern France. Named after the river Tarn, it had a population of 389,844 as of 2019. Its prefecture and largest city is Albi; it has a single subprefecture, Castres. In French, the inhabitants of Tarn are known as Tarnais (masculine) and Tarnaises (feminine). Its INSEE and postcode number is 81.
Les Baux-de-Provence, commonly called Baux, is a commune in the Bouches-du-Rhône department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of Southern France. It is located in the Alpilles mountains, atop a rocky outcrop that is crowned with a ruined castle overlooking the plains to the south. Its name refers to its site: in Provençal, bauç is a rocky spur. From the village name the word bauxite was coined for aluminium ore when first discovered there by geologist Pierre Berthier in 1821.
The French Riviera, known in French as the Côte d'Azur, is the Mediterranean coastline of the southeast corner of France. There is no official boundary, but it is usually considered to extend from Cassis, just east of Marseille, to Menton, at the France–Italy border, although some other sources place the western boundary further east around Toulon or Saint-Tropez. The coast is entirely within the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of France. The Principality of Monaco is a semi-enclave within the region, surrounded on three sides by France and fronting the Mediterranean. The French Riviera contains the seaside resorts of Cap-d'Ail, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, Cannes, Saint-Raphaël, Fréjus, Sainte-Maxime and Saint-Tropez.
The mistral is a strong, cold, northwesterly wind that blows from southern France into the Gulf of Lion in the northern Mediterranean. It produces sustained winds often exceeding 66 km/h, sometimes reaching 185 km/h. It is most common in the winter and spring, and strongest in the transition between the two seasons. Periods of the wind exceeding 30 km/h for more than sixty-five hours have been reported.
A Foehn or Föhn, is a type of dry, relatively warm, downslope wind that occurs in the lee of a mountain range. It is a rain shadow wind that results from the subsequent adiabatic warming of air that has dropped most of its moisture on windward slopes. As a consequence of the different adiabatic lapse rates of moist and dry air, the air on the leeward slopes becomes warmer than equivalent elevations on the windward slopes.
A rain shadow is an area of significantly reduced rainfall behind a mountainous region, on the side facing away from prevailing winds, known as its leeward side.
The Cévennes is a cultural region and range of mountains in south-central France, on the south-east edge of the Massif Central. It covers parts of the départements of Ardèche, Gard, Hérault and Lozère. Rich in geographical, natural, and cultural significance, portions of the region are protected within the Cévennes National Park, the Cévennes Biosphere Reserve (UNESCO), as well as a UNESCO World Heritage Site: Causses and the Cévennes, Mediterranean agro-pastoral Cultural Landscape. The area has been inhabited since 400,000 BCE and has numerous megaliths which were erected beginning around 2500 BCE. As an agriculturally-rich area, but not a suitable location for cities, the Cévennes developed a wide diversity of pastoral systems, including transhumance. The irrigation and road networks put in place in the early Middle Ages for these pastoral systems are still in use today.
The Gulf of Lion or Gulf of Lions is a wide embayment of the Mediterranean coastline of Catalonia in Spain with Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence in France, extending from Begur in the west to Toulon in the east.
Lamanon is a commune located in the Bouches-du-Rhône department, part of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southern France. Its inhabitants are called Lamanonais in French.
Tramontane is a classical name for a northern wind. The exact form of the name and precise direction varies from country to country. The word came to English from Italian tramontana, which developed from Latin trānsmontānus, "beyond/across the mountains", referring to the Alps in the North of Italy. The word has other non-wind-related senses: it can refer to anything that comes from, or anyone who lives on, the other side of mountains, or even more generally, anything seen as foreign, strange, or even barbarous.
The winds of Provence, the region of southeast France along the Mediterranean from the Alps to the mouth of the Rhone River, are an important feature of Provençal life, and each one has a traditional local name, in the Provençal language.
The levant is an easterly wind that blows in the western Mediterranean Sea and southern France, an example of mountain-gap wind. In Roussillon it is called "llevant" and in Corsica "levante". In the western Mediterranean, particularly when the wind blows through the Strait of Gibraltar, it is called the Viento de Levante or the Levanter. It is also known as the Solano.
Albania has a variety of climate systems. With its coastline facing the Adriatic and Ionian seas in the Mediterranean sea, its highlands backed upon the elevated Balkan landmass, and the entire country lying at a latitude subject to a variety of weather patterns during the winter and summer seasons, however it has a high number of climatic regions for such a small area. The coastal lowlands have typically mediterranean climate while the highlands have a continental climate. In both the lowlands and the interior, the weather varies markedly from north to south.
The lodos is the strong south-westerly wind which may predominate episodically in the Aegean Sea and Marmara Sea as well as the Mediterranean coast of Turkey all the year round; it frequently raises high seas and may give violent westerly squalls. The word lodos is Turkish, coming from Greek word "Notus", and originally means "southern wind".
References
- ↑ "Wind of the World: Marin | weatheronline.co.uk".
- ↑ Descriptions of local and regional winds on the Internet site of Meteo-France.
- Jean Vialar, Les vents régionaux et locaux, 1948, réédité par Météo-France en 2003
