Activities in Catalan country

What if you simply took THE TIME TO SLOW DOWN a little, since speed is undoubtedly killing us today !

In our modern societies, especially urban ones, as with the global banking and monetary system, time is constantly accelerating at great speed, in time-consuming ways. People whatever their backgrounds, genders and nationalities are far too over-stimulated because they are connected to robots, computers and screens almost 24 hours a day. The vast majority in the West live at 100 or 200 km/hour all day long and run all year round, even our entire lives, after increasingly erratic schedules. This is to try to reach “metro-work-resto-sleep” on time, manage our daily tasks as well as possible with dependent children or teenagers and other responsibilities, participate as best we can in associative, cultural, festive or sports (for us or our loved ones), still keep a few friends, stay young and attractive, perform well at work or in bed, etc. Always in competition with machines as with other humans (neighbors, colleagues, friends, siblings, schools, social networks, etc.), constantly in the search for physical and sporting performance, sensual and sexual, intellectual or other.

As a result, too stressed, too often and for too long, we take stimulants to keep us going (chocolate, coffee/tea and other hidden sugars in junk food, energy drinks, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, medicines, etc.). Without realizing that we gradually end up becoming clogged (clogged emunctories = chronic inflammation), falling ill and sometimes even dying prematurely (respiratory then digestive allergies, chronic and immunodepressive illnesses, cancers, etc.). And when finally, from time to time, we can slow down a little and unwind during a well-deserved vacation, weekend or occasional vacation, we have the “counter-effect” of this excessive speed and the over-stress of our “Quick Life “. In psychoanalysis, we call this the “boomerang” effect or the “decompensation” phase with more or less visible, annoying or even disabling side effects.

This is why, to prevent overheating, we suggest at Mas Natura that you finally take the time for you and your loved ones to simply slow down, breathe and ventilate fully, store as much marine and saline iodine as possible through sea water or swimming pool and especially melatonin through natural light from the sun and even the moon and stars. All this to sleep better, walk rather than run and eat more slowly… That is to say to experience the “Slow Life” which comes from “Slow Food” which “is an international movement whose main objective to raise awareness among citizens about eco-gastronomy and alternative consumption.” Despite its anglicism, it comes from an Italian concept dating from 1986 to take the opposite approach to fast food such as “Fast Food” by proposing, on the contrary, in Roman restaurants not only to take more time to eat but above all to eat better. , more slowly, locally and above all healthily. Knowing that this is only a suggestion, absolutely not an obligation !

Thus, in the same state of mind, the department of Pyrénées Orientales wants to offer its inhabitants as well as visitors another way of getting around by improving pedestrian and cycle traffic each year through better-developed paths and tracks, if possible in gravel rather than concrete, with small bridges below or above major roads to facilitate the movement of local residents and tourists, the movement of wildlife and therefore also the preservation of local flora. But above all in order to better connect towns and villages, hamlets to each other, particularly between sea and mountains, which will allow in the more or less long term to reduce traffic jams and road traffic with their inevitable carbon dioxide emissions, and therefore to at the same time reduce heat peaks, the reduction of species and pollution in general. Especially since we live in one of the most beautiful regions of France that is still quite wild and natural, when it escapes real estate and wind industrial developers… At least, we hope so for a long time !

It is with this objective also that we provide our guests, in addition to documentation on tourist activities, local maps of cycle, hiking or equestrian trails, as well as a list of good addresses of artisans, traders, farmers and local winegrowers, such as good gourmet, semi-gastronomic or other restaurants, in order to combine, as in Italy or Spain, “Bella Vita” & “Slow Life/Slow Food” with “Belle Vie” or “Art de Living” from the South of France too.