Montcuq, located in the Lot, became famous throughout France in 1976 when he appeared on Antenne 2 in Jacques Martin’s satirical program, Le Petit Rapporteur. Its atypical name immediately attracts great fame to the small village of 1,241 inhabitants.
In 2013, Antoine Deblay, then a communication student in Aurillac, decided to can the air of his village and sell it under the name “L’Air de Montcuq”. On its website, we can read: “Ideal when you are in lack of creative inspiration, the Fresh Air of Montcuq immerses you in the depths of this small village of the Lot in order to refresh your ideas.” Today, the village is part of the new town of Montcuq-en-Quercy-Blanc but has not lost its notoriety.
Do you know Oust in Ariège, Espère in Lot, or Fourtou in Aude? If not, Hanaé Lecasio wrote and edited the perfect little book, last May, to learn more about the villages of France: Kiabitou. This surprising tourist guide allows you to discover 450 towns with amusing, unusual, even burlesque names in France. For the author, it is a question of “doing a kind of tourism that is a little crazy, a little special, discovering the names of the inhabitants.”
“I discovered during my research that municipalities had names of animals, cities, colors, foods, objects, verbs…”, says Hanaé Lecasio at the microphone of Circuit Bleu, Côté Culture on France Blue Occitanie. Discover in our slideshow some of the villages with the most surprising names in France.
