Bucolic and colorful meeting, one of the big meetings summer market gardens, where the many visitors are invited to sit in a flat (traditional flat-bottomed boat) to slide towards the stalls anchored here and there and fill their baskets with local products.
The date
- The 27 July 2024
Market on the water Lapwing-Irleau
This popular festival is a nostalgic reminder of ancestral Maraîchine traditions, at a time, not so old, when the boat was the only means of transport for transporting men, animals and goods along the water.
Relive for a day, the last Saturday in July, on the Grand Port of Lapwing, this event which, year after year, enjoys great success.
Sitting in a small boat, accompanied by boatman and its pigouille, leave meeting the benches of country merchants : this is the tempting program for the morning!
Around fifty producers and artisans offer the delights of their market garden region: Mogettes, garden vegetables, traditional jams, honey, farm cheeses and other delicacies.
The market also revolves around other activities on the water: the bride and groom's parade, the transport of animals, the wooden train...
A secret of the Marais Poitevin
Sébastien, the manager of the brasserie from the Marais Poitevin “The Mule's Head” tells us about this market which he describes as “extraordinary”.
Let’s hear why…
Short history of market gardening
Flash back to a outdated era, immortalized on old postcards, snapshots of slices of peasant life narrating the Poitevin marsh from the time when moving from one market garden village to another was carried out by borrowing ditches, conches and channels until the construction in the 1950s-1960s of footbridges and motorable paths serving most of the plots contributes to the disappearance of this ancestral “custom” which today adopts another, that of green tourism!
Did you know?
Le Poitevin marsh is crisscrossed by 8 km of waterways, i.e. by 800 kilometers of primary network falling under the jurisdiction of the State via the Interdepartmental Institution of the Sèvre Niortaise Basin (IIBSN), by 1 kilometers of secondary network under the responsibility of the marsh unions and by 100 kilometers tertiary network maintained by the owners of the property.
Road information on access to the Irleau bridge
Tourist vehicles over 2 meters wide and motorhomes or caravans over 3 meters wide or over 3,5 tonnes are authorized to use the Irleau bridge (RD 123, between coulon et The Lapwing). The speed is limited to 30 km/h.
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