Céret: Picasso's Cherry Town and the Devil's Bridge

Required Activities

• In the Musée d'Art moderne de Céret find Picasso's bullfighting coupelles, given by the artist in 1953, his Nature morte au crâne et au pichet, Matisse's Barques à Collioure and Soutine's Vue sur Céret, la vieille ville, then walk out and stand where Soutine painted it

• Walk across the Pont du Diable over the Tech, built between 1321 and 1341, whose single 45.45 m arch held the world record for a stone span until the Scaliger bridge took it in 1356, and look down the 22.30 m from the crown to the river the Devil is said to have left one stone short

• Visit the Musée de la Musique in the old Saint-Pierre hospital of 1649, where about five hundred of its three thousand instruments are on show, and work through the oboes of the world collected over thirty years by Heinz Stefan Herzka and Verena Nil — one of the largest collections of the family anywhere — then find the Catalan tenora and tible played in a cobla

• See the Roman baths at Amélie-les-Bains, listed as a monument historique since 1905 and still standing beside the army thermal hospital, on the hot springs that gave the town its old name, Els Banys d'Arles

• Visit the abbey of Sainte-Marie at Arles-sur-Tech, founded on this site in 820 by abbot Sunifred after the first monastery was destroyed, and find the Sainte-Tombe, the 5th-century sarcophagus of blue Céret marble beneath the effigy of Gaucelme de Tallet, which fills with water that seeps through its porous lid