Moving to Eymet: Life in the Dordogne Bastide

Why people keep moving to Eymet

Eymet is a bastide town, founded in the 13th century and laid out on the familiar medieval grid: straight streets running off a central square with stone arcades on all four sides. It sits on the Dropt, the same modest river that runs east to west along the bottom of the Dordogne before crossing the departmental line into Lot-et-Garonne. It is close enough to Duras, Issigeac and Bergerac to feel connected to the wider region rather than marooned in it, and far enough from the motorways to keep the calm that draws people here in the first place.

Plenty of towns in this corner of France share that basic description. What sets Eymet apart, and what makes moving to Eymet a genuinely different proposition from buying in the villages around it, is the community. Eymet has attracted English-speaking residents since long before Brexit, and that has shaped the place in ways that are entirely practical. There are bilingual estate agents, tradespeople who will quote in English, a rugby club, a choir, book groups and charity events where you can meet people in your first week. For anyone who has watched a move to rural France quietly fail through isolation — and that failure is more common than the brochures admit — those ready-made networks matter enormously.

The second reason people buy here is walkability. You can live in the centre of Eymet without a daily drive to the shops. That is rarer than it sounds in this region, where most pretty villages have a church, a boulangerie and very little else, and where "popping out for bread" usually means a round trip in the car. In Eymet you can genuinely leave the keys on the hook for days at a time.

The third reason is simply that it is a good town on its own terms. Living in Eymet means a real market, a river to walk beside, a square worth sitting in, and enough restaurants and cafés to give the week some shape. It is not a museum piece that empties out in October. This guide is biased towards Duras and will say so plainly later on, but Eymet earns its reputation. The honest question is not whether it is a lovely place — it is — but whether the particular flavour of that place suits the life you actually want.

The town itself: the bastide, the square and the river

To understand Eymet you have to understand the bastide. These were the planned new towns of the 13th and 14th centuries, laid out to a deliberate template: a rectangular grid of streets, a central marketplace, and arcaded walkways — the couverts — running around the square so that trade could carry on in rain or fierce sun. Eymet follows that pattern closely, and the place à arcades at its heart is the reason so many people fall for the town on a first visit.

The square is the stage on which Eymet's daily life plays out. The arcades shelter cafés and restaurants whose tables spill outward in the warmer months; the honey-coloured stone glows in the late afternoon; and at the centre stands the reminder of just how old this all is. Around and behind the square, the grid of streets holds the town houses — tall, narrow, stone-fronted, some with hidden courtyards or long thin gardens behind unremarkable façades. A little further out, the medieval core gives way to more open plots, modern pavillons and the lanes that lead to the surrounding farmland.

The river gives the town its softer edge. The Dropt runs along one side of Eymet, and the walk beside it is one of the small daily pleasures of living here — level, shaded, easy for older legs and dogs and pushchairs alike. There is a campsite and open space near the water, and in summer the riverbank becomes part of the town's social geography, a place to walk off a long lunch or watch the light go.

What all this adds up to is a town at a very human scale. Eymet is big enough to keep you supplied and entertained, and small enough that you will start recognising faces within weeks. You are never far from a coffee, never far from bread, and never far from someone who might, in time, become a friend. That intimacy is precisely what people are chasing when they leave a larger, more anonymous life behind — and it is one of the strongest arguments for the town.

The British and international community, honestly appraised

There is no point being coy about the defining feature of moving to Eymet: the size of the foreign community. Eymet has one of the highest concentrations of British and other English-speaking residents anywhere in rural France, and it has held that reputation for decades. On a summer morning on the arcaded square you may hear as much English as French. There are British-run businesses, English-language noticeboards, and a social calendar that in places runs largely in English.

For a great many people, that is not a drawback at all — it is the whole point, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. If you are moving to France later in life, without fluent French, and without the years ahead to build a social circle slowly from nothing, an established English-speaking community is an enormous practical asset. It means you can arrange a plumber, find a doctor, join a choir and make friends in the first fortnight rather than the first year. It means someone has already made every mistake you are about to make and will happily tell you how to avoid it. When a move goes wrong, it is very often loneliness that breaks it; Eymet's community is a real insurance policy against that.

But the same feature is exactly why some people choose to live somewhere else, and it deserves an honest hearing. If your reason for coming to France is to live a French life — to be woven into a village where the daily language, the neighbours, the school gate and the café are all French — then a town where you can spend a week hearing mostly English may quietly undercut the very thing you came for. It is entirely possible to move to Eymet and, five years on, still function almost entirely in English, with a social life that could exist, more or less unchanged, in a corner of Surrey with better weather. Whether that is a comfort or a disappointment depends entirely on what you were hoping for.

The seasonality matters too. In July and August the town fills — second-home owners return, holidaymakers arrive, the square is busy and parking is tight. In February it is a quieter, more local, more genuinely French place. Both versions of Eymet are real, and you should see both before you decide. A weekend in high summer will show you the town at its liveliest and most international; a wet week in winter will show you what daily life is actually like for the eleven months that are not August.

The most balanced advice, and it is the advice the honest long-timers give, is to treat the community as a resource without living entirely inside it. The people who settle best use the international network for its warmth and its recommendations, and then push past it — taking French lessons, shopping in the surrounding markets, joining French associations, making the effort to be a resident of France rather than a visitor who never left. Eymet gives you the soft landing. What you do after you land is up to you.

Property and what it costs

Property is usually where the trade-offs of moving to Eymet become concrete. Demand from incoming buyers has been steady for a long time, the town centre is genuinely walkable, and the name carries a certain cachet among house-hunters — all of which tends to put a premium on Eymet property compared with equivalent homes in less-discovered communes nearby.

Within the bastide you will find the classic maison de bourg: a stone town house, often on three floors, sometimes with a courtyard or a surprisingly deep garden hidden behind the street front. These suit permanent residents and lock-up-and-leave owners who want to step out of the front door into town life. The trade-offs are the usual ones for town houses everywhere — shared walls, limited or no private parking, and the occasional noise that comes with living where things actually happen. Push a few kilometres out and the character changes: modern pavillons on the edges of town, then stone farmhouses, barns and homes with land in the surrounding countryside, where your money buys more space but you take on the car dependence and the maintenance that isolation brings.

The single most important thing to understand — and it is true across the whole region, not just Eymet — is that the asking price is only the starting figure. Condition is everything. A low purchase price can be entirely cancelled out by a failing roof, weak insulation, an inefficient heating system or a non-compliant septic tank. Many rural properties outside the town centre run on a fosse septique rather than mains drainage, and when such a house is sold the SPANC drainage report matters: if it requires works, the buyer generally inherits the obligation to carry them out, and a replacement system does not come cheap. Older houses can also carry a poor DPE energy rating, which translates directly into cold winters and large bills. The cheapest house on the market is very often the most expensive home once it is dry, warm and compliant.

If your budget feels tight against Eymet's prices, the obvious move is to look at what the same money buys a short drive away. Village houses a few kilometres out, or over the departmental border south towards Duras, Lauzun and Miramont, will frequently give you more house, more land, or both, for the same outlay. What you trade away is the walk to the boulangerie and the density of the English-speaking network. That is a real trade, and only you can price it. For anyone comparing towns seriously, it is worth reading a proper account of the buying process in France first — the notaire's role, the compromis de vente, the diagnostics, the succession rules — because the mechanics are the same wherever in this borderland you end up buying, and the pitfalls catch the unprepared regardless of how charming the square is.

Day-to-day amenities: shops, market, healthcare and schools

The practical case for living in Eymet rests on a genuinely useful range of everyday amenities, unusual for a town of its size.

The centrepiece is the Thursday market, which gathers around the handsome arcaded square. It runs year-round, swelling in summer and, in high season, giving way in the evenings to the marchés nocturnes — the evening producer markets built around food stalls and long communal tables that are one of the great pleasures of a south-west French summer. The market is where the region's larder comes into focus: strawberries and melons in season, deep-red Marmande tomatoes, walnuts, duck in all its forms, cheeses and charcuterie, and the local wines. Shopping this way is not just cheaper than recreating a supermarket basket of familiar brands — it is the point of being here.

Beyond the market, Eymet carries a supermarket, bakeries, a butcher, pharmacies, banks or cash access, hairdressers, bars and restaurants — the everyday infrastructure that lets you live without a daily drive. For healthcare, the town has doctors, dentists, nurses and pharmacies locally; as anywhere in rural France, the sensible move is to register with a médecin traitant early, because patient lists fill up and the newcomer who leaves it too long can find every list in town closed. For anything more serious — the hospital, specialist appointments, larger retail, the DIY sheds — you look to Bergerac, roughly half an hour north, or to Marmande.

Families are reasonably served. Eymet has maternelle and primaire schools in the town, with collège and lycée options in Bergerac and the surrounding towns reached by the usual school buses (ramassage scolaire). Enrolment starts with the mairie, which is also the first stop for the practical business of settling in — waste and recycling arrangements, déchèterie access, local rules on bonfires and water use. There is a médiathèque, sports facilities, the campsite and the river walks, and a summer calendar busy enough that boredom is rarely the problem.

On the domestic budget, the wider regional figures give a useful frame. A couple might reasonably budget somewhere in the region of €400–€700 a month for groceries, depending on diet and how much they lean on the market rather than imported brands. A weekday set lunch typically runs around €15–€22 a head, a more ambitious dinner around €35–€60 before drinks, and a good bottle of local wine bought from the producer somewhere between €5 and €12. Energy is one area where France does not necessarily feel cheap — an old stone house with high ceilings and thin insulation can be expensive to heat regardless of what it cost to buy — so budget realistically for the specific property, not the postcard.

Getting there: Bergerac airport and the roads

One of Eymet's quieter advantages is how reachable it is. Bergerac airport sits roughly half an hour north, and it runs seasonal flights to the UK and northern Europe — genuinely useful for keeping up with family and for the friends who will inevitably want to visit once you have a spare room in France. The word to hold onto is seasonal: routes and frequencies shift with the calendar, thinning in winter, so if regular, year-round flying matters to you, check the current schedules rather than assuming the summer timetable holds all year.

For larger journeys, Bergerac has a railway station, and further afield Bordeaux — comfortably under two hours west by road — offers the TGV connection to Paris and a full international airport. Sainte-Foy-la-Grande and Marmande add their own rail connections towards Bordeaux for those who prefer the train to the plane.

On the ground, this is car country, and moving to Eymet does not change that as much as the walkable centre might suggest. You can live day to day in the town without driving, but the moment you want the hospital, a big shop, a specialist, a train or a friend two villages over, you need a car — and a rural household often needs one per working adult. Fuel is not reliably cheaper than in northern Europe, and rural mileage accumulates faster than newcomers expect. The compensation is that parking is generally easy and free once you leave the busiest summer weekends behind, and that the roads themselves — quiet, scenic, rarely congested — turn the driving into one of the pleasures rather than a chore.

The social scene and integration

The texture of daily life in Eymet is genuinely sociable, and that is one of its strongest selling points. The café tables under the arcades, the market that doubles as a weekly reunion, the summer events, the clubs and choirs and charity fundraisers — there is a lot going on, and it is unusually easy for a newcomer to plug into. Where some rural French towns can feel closed to outsiders for years, Eymet's long history of welcoming incomers means the door is already open. You will rarely struggle to find company here.

The nuance, as ever, is the language of that social life. A large slice of Eymet's organised sociability runs in English, which is exactly what makes it so accessible and exactly what can hold you back. It is perfectly possible to build a full and happy social calendar in Eymet without much French at all — and it is just as possible to let that convenience quietly wall you off from the French life around you. The most rewarding version of living in Eymet combines the two: the international network for warmth, reassurance and recommendations, and a deliberate effort to build a French life alongside it.

That effort is not complicated, but it does have to be chosen. Start French lessons early — few investments repay themselves faster, because better French improves every appointment, every neighbourly exchange and every unexpected problem you have to solve. Say bonjour before you ask for anything in a shop. Learn the rhythm of the week, including the lunchtime and Sunday closures that catch every newcomer out at first. Join a French association rather than only an English-speaking one; shop the markets in the surrounding towns — Duras on Monday, Issigeac and Monpazier and the rest — where you will hear far less English and be pushed, gently, into using your own. Introduce yourself to your neighbours; an apéro offered over the fence opens more doors than any amount of paperwork. The community will carry you through the first months. Whether you become a resident of France or merely a long-term visitor is a decision you make in the years after.

The honest pros and cons

No town is right for everyone, and the honest way to weigh Eymet is to lay out both columns plainly.

In its favour: Eymet is one of the gentlest introductions to rural south-west France you can arrange. It offers a genuinely walkable town centre, a proper year-round market, a strong range of everyday shops, healthcare and schools, and a river and square that make ordinary days pleasant. Above all, it offers the soft landing of a large, established English-speaking community — practical support, ready friendship, and a real defence against the isolation that undoes so many rural moves. Bergerac airport is close, the wider region is glorious, and the town has enough life to feel connected all year rather than only in August.

Against it: that same popularity is the principal caveat. Eymet commands a price premium over less-discovered towns and villages, so your budget will usually stretch further a few kilometres out or over the border towards Duras. In high summer the town is busy, parking is tight, and the international character is at its most pronounced — a delight to some, a disappointment to those who came for a more thoroughly French life. And the very ease of English-speaking life makes it possible to never quite integrate, to live in France without ever really living in French. Add to that the universal cautions of rural property — the fosse septique, the DPE, the roof behind the pretty shutters — and you have a place that rewards clear eyes as much as an open heart.

None of these are reasons not to move to Eymet. They are simply the trade-offs to price honestly before you sign anything.

Is Eymet right for you?

The people who thrive in Eymet tend to know exactly what they are choosing. They want a soft landing more than a total immersion; they value walkability and ready community over maximum space and privacy; they are moving at a stage of life where an English-speaking network is a genuine reassurance rather than a compromise; and they are honest enough with themselves to keep pushing into French life anyway. For that person, moving to Eymet is close to ideal.

The people who should think twice are those whose whole motivation is to disappear into a French village, to be the only English voice at the market, to build a life that is French to its bones. They may find Eymet's character works against them — and they may be far happier in one of the quieter communes around it, using Eymet as a place to visit rather than a place to live.

The most reliable way to tell which you are is not to decide from a brochure. See the town in two seasons. Better still, rent for six to twelve months before you buy — it costs a fraction of buying the wrong house and having to sell it again, and it tells you more about a place than any number of viewings. A great many people arrive in Eymet, learn the ropes inside a year, and then either stay happily or move out into the surrounding hamlets and across the departmental line, now confident about what they actually want. That is not a failure of the town; it is the town doing exactly the job it does best.

How Eymet fits within Duras and its surrounding areas

Eymet does not sit on its own. It is one point in a broad, borderless area where the Dordogne, Lot-et-Garonne and the Gironde meet — an area framed by Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Bergerac, Villeréal, Lauzun and Marmande, and centred, in the eyes of this guide, on Duras. Understanding how Eymet fits into that constellation is the key to a good decision, because buyers so often find themselves comparing the two.

Duras lies barely twelve kilometres south of Eymet, about fifteen minutes by road, just over the line into Lot-et-Garonne. The two towns are close enough that you could live in one and shop, eat and socialise in the other without a second thought, yet they have distinctly different characters — which is precisely why so many house-hunters weigh them against each other.

Eymet is the bigger, busier, more visibly international of the pair: more services within walking distance, more English spoken, an easier first year for a newcomer without French, but higher prices and livelier, more crowded summers. Duras is quieter and more traditionally French in its daily rhythm. Its 12th-century château rises above the town and the surrounding Côtes de Duras vineyards, giving a small place an outsized sense of identity, and its Monday market, year-round shops and wine culture keep it grounded in the region rather than the international set. It has an established British, Dutch and wider international community of its own, so support is there — but daily life leans more French, property tends to offer better value, and the trade-off is a little more driving for the broadest range of services. Neither is better; they are answers to different questions.

That is the honest frame for anyone deciding where in this corner of France to put down roots. Eymet offers the softest possible landing. Duras offers the sweet spot the wider guide keeps circling back to: character without crowds, community that stays unmistakably French, real value, and a central position that puts three départements within easy reach. A very sensible path — one many people take — is to use Eymet's easy first year to find your feet, then decide with open eyes whether to stay put, move out into the surrounding villages, or head south to Duras and its quieter vineyards.

Whichever way you lean, the decision is far easier with someone local who has no house to sell you. Tina lives in the Duras area, knows both towns and the villages between them, and can talk you through the differences — the community, the property, the running costs, the compromises — in your own language, before emotion takes over from good sense. If you are weighing moving to Eymet against a quieter life around Duras, the sensible next step is not another viewing but a proper conversation. Browse the homes currently available across the area to see what your budget might buy, read on through the buying, cost-of-living and first-90-days guides to fill in the practical detail, and talk to Tina when you are ready to turn a broad idea into a plan you can actually live in.