Just a 15 minutes drive away from the Spanish border and facing out onto the tempestuous Bay of Biscay, the French town of Biarritz is something of an enigma. This small, seemingly innocuous seaside town gets a lot of press - it begs the question! Well, for what the picturesque Basque resort lacks in stature, it more than makes up for in terms of status.

The truth is that, for a whole host of reasons, Biarritz is known for attracting tourists of the highest social calibre. The fact that Biarritz acts as a holiday haven for the rich and famous is, however, by no means a recent phenomenon - Napoleon III was chiefly responsible for the transformation of this working whaling port into chic resort when he commissioned the building of a summer palace for his wife, the Spanish countess Eugénie de Montijo. The palace remains, but in the form of the splendid Hôtel du Palais. Nowadays, Biarritz caters for all tastes.

For many of us, France is a summer destination, and those of us who do venture across the Channel in the winter, go predominantly to ski. Nothing could be better, however, in the run up to Christmas than a few days in one of the many French towns which host a Christmas market.

Traditionally, French housewives spent the weeks before Christmas baking and cooking traditional dishes for the festive season, and this was the genesis of the Christmas market which stocked all the special ingredients they would need. The markets now are full of local produce, including organic poultry and regional specialities, such as honey and olive oil, many of which make ideal Christmas presents for gourmets! The French are expert in wrapping sweets and chocolates as though creating a work of art, so if you have someone with a sweet tooth to buy for, this is your chance to impress.

If, like most of us, you are fed up with the awful summer weather we have and are wishing that you had a bolthole in the sun, you will envy Trish Purnell with her renovated flour mill in sunny Burgundy. Trish, a retired school teacher living in Cambridgeshire, with sons in their early thirties, had for a while been mulling over the idea of buying a holiday home in France and started investigating the market in May 2006. She chose the Burgundy area, not only for its good transport links making it drivable from the UK in a day, but also because it is an area which has not become a British enclave.  So many of our favourite holiday areas in France have lost their appeal with half of the Home Counties spending the summer there.