THE enduring popularity of everything French and escapist, from A Year in Provence to A Place in the Sun, shows that the desire to possess a cheese-and-wine-stocked Gallic bolt hole is strong within our national psyche. According to a Mintel survey in November, a quarter of the UK population want to buy property in France.

Thanks to Channel 4, we’re all familiar with the hapless young couple who sell their nice flat in Fulham and relocate to a leaking barn in the Dordogne, hoping in vain to turn the cowshed into a holiday lettings moneyspinner. But there is an easier way to buy in France, particularly if you want a holiday house for occasional visits rather than a year-round home A new development in the Lot, a beautiful area in the southwest with a lower Brit tourist count than the neighbouring Dordogne, will appeal to those who want to dispense with French builders and bureaucrats, and who fancy the generous tax incentives and guaranteed rental returns.

Le Vallon des Causses is a development by the Lagrange group, a French residential management company and property sales agency, of one, two and three-bedroom houses with private parking, gardens and a communal pool. The 110 units will cluster on the outskirts of the old market town of Gramat, capital of the Causses du Quercy national park, a limestone plateau east of Cahors. The houses are on sale off-plan through Erna Low Property in the UK, with prices from €126,000 (£83,000) for a one-bedroom to €192,500 for a three-bed, plus €7,500 for furniture and €4,000 for parking. Costs work out at about €3,600 per square metre, and completion will be in April 2008.

The Lot region is stuffed with appealing goodies; foie gras and truffles are on the menu, and there is a patchwork of limestone villages nestling in golden farmland. The area’s main tourist draw is the lovely pilgrimage site of Rocamadour, five minutes’ drive from Gramat — a tumbling chain of houses and churches clinging to a steep gorge topped by a fortress. The town sprang up round a series of chapels built by monks in the 12th century. Pilgrims would climb the 216 steps on their knees to the chapel of the miraculous black Virgin. Today the town’s population is 630; in the Middle Ages it was 8,000. Between April and October, a million visitors throng the tiny streets, so off-season visiting is recommended. The area is served by airports at Bergerac, Toulouse and, by the end of this year, Souillac, 55km (34 miles) from Gramat.

Despite its tourist draws, high-quality accommodation for holidaymakers is hard to come by in the Lot, and the Gramat development is one of the first of its kind. The scheme is encouraged by the French Government, which five years ago, in an attempt to boost tourism, declared the Lot a “revitalisation zone”. A French resident buying a new-build buy-to-let property benefits from €12,500 tax relief over six years, and all buyers, including the British, are guaranteed a 5 per cent rental return for 11 years plus exemption from French VAT at 19.6 per cent as part of a government leaseback scheme.

Perrine Leclerc, the Anglophile foreign sales manager at Lagrange, expects sales to be split 60/40 between British and French buyers, and for foreign tourists to account for 80 per cent of rentals. The strength of the pound and the relative sluggishness of the French economy mean that most French people “can’t afford a Gramat-style development for two weeks in August”, she says. The British “bring money and do refurbishments and are faithful to the local style, and thanks to them the economy is kept afloat. I love them for that. It has happened to the Alps and the Loire, and now the Lot.”

www.ernalowproperty.co.uk, 020-7590 1624

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