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By Ricc Bieber, SCNA member

When planning a visit to Cap d’Agde, remeber the timeold addage: "Buyer beware!" That about sums it up.

As many a savvy naturist knows, the Cap’s legendary "quartier naturiste" has much to offer: expansive beaches, balmy Mediterranean climate, Gallic culture and cuisine and, of course, a chance to go naked around the clock without fear of arrest. But anyone who mistakes Cap d’Agde for some kind of innocent naturist Eden is in for a surprise.

I planned a vacation to Cap d’Agde last June, assuming I would be visiting some kind of high-toned naturist enclave. That’s not what I found. This city is not a a resort, it’s a city, a place where people come to go on vacation. And if nobody tells you what to expect, you go there with an expectation, and that vision can be mangled and shattered within a day.

My list of complaints is long and detailed: dilapidated facilities, unkempt grounds, rude service, noisy construction crews and discos that made a good night’s sleep impossible. From a naturist perspective, however, the complaint that matters most has to do with the atmosphere of the place, with its fetish shops, gawkers, exhibitionists, open solicitation, and sexually charged nightlife.

During the day on the beach it appears to be a normal naturist setting. You can see two, three, sometimes four generations together, although if you look more closely you will see groups of top-free or naked women being bothered by groups of young men eager for an easy pickup. In Helio Village, a few blocks away from the beach, there are a lot of sex shops selling things like nipple clamps, cock rings, stuff like that. You learn to avoid those streets unless that is your thing.

However I found the evenings very odd. Everyone would be dressed. While the men would wear normal kinds of street clothes, the women would wear very sexual things—chains, see-through dresses, bondage clothing. In every city you have a little red light district. In Cap d'Agde, this is the essence of Helio Village - at least of its bars, all-night night clubs, and some of the restaurants. The young men blatantly cruise these streets looking for sex (from either gender), and the constant strutting exhibitionism just gets old. After a week of the pound-pound-pound of disco music and sexually-suggestive pole dancers (many of them drunken tourists), I gave up trying to get a normal meal or just a quiet drink, I bought food in the grocery stores and ate my meals in my hotel room.

I shelled out $1,000 for a week’s stay, which seemed like a great deal until I got there. Americans accustomed to a certain level of comfort, civility and cleanliness should expect to be put off by Cap d’Agde. At the Héliopolis apartment building, the horseshoe-shaped structure often depicted in Cap d’Agde photographs, I was treated to a view of stunning decay and neglect. You look out your window and you’re looking literally at six-to eight-foot tall weeds. I was stunned how run down the place is. You look at the pictures of Cap d’Agde and you realize the pictures are 15 years old, when everything was new, or 20 years old, when everything was even newer. My travel agent said the city used to have many more problems but that it had really cleaned up its act in the past 3 or 4 years. I intend to have a serious talk with him about the source of his misinformation real soon.

In closing, if you want to give Cap d'Agde a try anyway, I suggest you go during the "high season" in late July and August when I was told the flood of true naturists overwhelms the less desirable elements. But in my opinion, the place is no naturist paradise. Maybe it never was; maybe it has been oversold all these years. Still, it is a place where round-the-clock nudity is possible, albeit sometimes challenging. The tensions and contradictions of Cap d’Agde are captured in its nickname: the Naked City. The "naked" part is nice. It’s the "city" part that is the problem.