At Eurocamp, we were free – 25 years later and I now see why my parents took us there

My memories of childhood summers in French holiday parks are golden, but would I still feel that magic returning as an adult?

Sociologists don’t generally believe there’s a minimum amount of time before the process of institutionalisation kicks in. During a period of confinement, changes to somebody’s personality – particularly their acceptance of new norms, routines and structures, however alien they may have been to them before – very much depend on the circumstances and the individual in question.
That said, in prisons it usually takes at least six months. In hospitals it’s often a little longer. In the military it could be years before a recruit is drastically altered. And at Eurocamp, the jolly outdoor holiday experience that’s snared British families for over half a century, I reckon it takes about three and a half hours. Four, tops.
I was thinking about all this as I sat by the bar on the first of four evenings at Domaine de Massereau, a Eurocamp site in Languedoc, in the far south of France, earlier this summer. The light was ebbing to a sultry haze. The cicadas rasped away, competing with a human acoustic duo – she with white-blonde dreadlocks, he with a guitar, fedora, and the face of Alan Shearer – whisper-singing Just the Two of Us from a temporary stage by the pool.
Before me was a Belgian lager with the ABV of an industrial de-icer, served in a goblet the size of my head. My wife, Hattie, had a less comical measure of white wine, albeit her third. We were only trying to keep up: all around, adults from across continental Europe were getting drunk with the particular alacrity that must arrive with the knowledge your children can neither come to harm, nor physically leave the compound, without a sober, first-aid-trained staff member in a polo shirt noticing.
Announcing a short break, the acoustic duo introduced themselves, for the fourth time that evening, as ‘Bohemian Dandy’. They come every Thursday. Then both members turned 180 degrees on their stools, as if this meant we could no longer see them, and simultaneously lit cigarettes. Soon, a glass was smashed somewhere near the ball pit. A cheer rose. A barman looked murderous. A Dutch family didn’t look up from their mysterious card game. A leathery old man swayed with unlikely grace. Teenagers locked eyes.
As a tableau vivant, it had it all. And at that moment, a blond toddler in crocodile-print swimming shorts pitter-pattered by our table, clearly on a mission of sorts. He wore a look of pure, unbridled independence, as well as a walkie-talkie and an Apple AirTag strapped to his chest. I gave him a respectful nod and leaned back. ‘So, was it always like this?’ Hattie asked. I smiled. ‘It’s like I never left.’
My parents would probably contest this fact – and they’d be right to, because it’s not true – but I’m fairly certain I spent more than 50 per cent of my childhood Eurocamping in France. The memories are outsized, in any case. Of dawn starts and bleary-eyed, snappy siblings; of having to sit, crammed and alone, in the back seat of our Mitsubishi Space Wagon because I’m the youngest, but finding an upside in unfettered access to the Ginger Nuts that Mum had packed in the food bag.
Of my dad knowing almost no French beyond ‘une bière, s’il vous plaît, et Orangina pour les enfants, merci’, but somehow being fluent in road rage as soon as we shot off the ferry and on to the autoroutes. Of uncanny French McDonald’s drive-thru lunches to keep us quiet. Of the thrill of the pause as we waited for the barriers to raise at our ‘parc’. Of the cheeky-chappy young English reps who’d give us the welcoming spiel and ask if we kids were ‘ready to have fun fun fun!!!!’.
Of rocking back so far on the cheap white plastic chairs around the café terrace that the legs quivered. Of older teenagers from foreign lands, who were either otherworldly in their beauty or just otherworldly in how good they were at pool.
Of being trusted with my sister and brother to buy baguettes and croissants from the camp shop every morning, with 25 francs tucked in our tiny fists, as if failure to secure those baked goods would mean our family might starve.
Of snaking water slides, dripping ice cream sandwiches, incendiary barbecues, bouncy balls in vending machines, towering bar stools, oily sun cream, and a bedtime significantly later than at home (I have just this second realised my mother may have used the time difference to fool me). At Eurocamp, the rules were different. At Eurocamp, we were free.
In reality we didn’t go every year. But my parents did reel off a list of at least five different locations – Biarritz, Biscarrosse, St-Jean-de-Luz, ‘a couple in central France we can’t remember’ – where our family of five set up camp for a week or so in Julys and Augusts between 1991 and 2000. When Eurocamp was started by Alan Goulding in 1973, he had just one site in Brittany. The company has been sold multiple times since then, and now operates a network of over 400 parcs, smattered from Spain to Croatia and (almost) everywhere in between.
I wanted to go back to Eurocamp, to see if it’s still possible to entirely lose yourself inside its weird bubble. Surely, as an adult and not a parent, it’s hell?
We chose Domaine de Massereau, a relatively small parc just outside the ancient village of Sommières, since it was assessed as ‘good for couples’. It is difficult to know how this judgment was reached, besides there being a vineyard next door, but that was good enough.
Taking a car the entire way there would have been the authentic thing to do, but while my dad would probably try to drive himself to Pluto rather than risk the rocket being delayed or cramped, I am somebody who finds being behind the wheel of any vehicle a curious mixture of deathly boring and phenomenally stressful. So we flew to Carcassonne, rented a car and drove for three hours instead of 13. Civilised. Better. Definitely not cheaper.
The camp turned out to be an idyll in an already beautiful part of France. Arriving late on a Thursday, it became apparent that we weren’t checking into a Eurocamp parc at all, but one run by Marvilla, a company under the same European Camping Group (ECG) umbrella. This was an alarming technicality: would the vibe be different? What if they had no pool table? In the car park, an unnecessarily attractive family sashayed past. Oh God, had Eurocamp become… chic?
Any fears were soon assuaged. Beside the reception desk was a wall of leaflets offering just about every activity you could ever conceive of, especially if it involved wine or horses. As I filled in a form, a golf buggy pulled up.
A man in a giant foam tiger suit (with dungarees) had been chauffeured to the hut by a rep. He climbed out and walked straight into a door frame, then took his head off and tried the door again, more successfully. ‘That’s Topi, the camp mascot,’ I was informed. We were handed our wristbands, to wear at all times. No, I thought, Eurocamp hasn’t changed.
Only it has, a bit, in that hardly anybody seems to camp any more. It was always a microcosm of a highly stratified society – the tent people, the motorhome dwellers, the full-on cabin crowd – but now it seems even the lowest caste get cabins, or ‘chalets’, but that not all chalets are equal. It’s progress, I guess. Gentrification needn’t always be a bad thing.
Ours was somewhere in the middle, a three-bed under an oak tree, with kitchen, terrace, barbecue, parking space, deck chairs and every mod-con we could desire. It was halfway up a charming little lane, delineated from our neighbours with a chest-height box hedge. Eurocamp sites were forever toy towns – queasily perfect neighbourhoods of the kind you only see on board games, or in America. Even by those standards, though, Domaine de Massereau was adorable.
I once heard that farmers like to do ‘perimeter walks’ of their land about once a month, just to make sure there’s nothing untoward going on at the boundaries of their responsibility, and I think all campers should do the same when arriving at a new site. So en route to the bar, we took a twilight turn. It was important to know who we were sleeping near and sharing flumes with, and vital we discovered whether anyone had a slightly better chalet than us.
Our direct neighbours were mainly Dutch or German. Strong, Teutonic waves let them know we came in peace. Making sure to trust and get on well with those watching you wash up was a feature of my childhood trips. At one such camp in 1993, I briefly went missing, aged 22 months, triggering a fevered site-wide search. After ‘a very long 15 minutes’ in which my mother probably had all sorts of xenophobic thoughts she’d now never admit to, she discovered me curled up asleep in the lining of our tent. The neighbours that day were apparently more than happy to assist, just as others were in another year when I sliced my heel down to the tendon on a caravan door. It takes a village.
Besides, Hattie and I don’t have kids, which at Eurocamp makes you look about as inconspicuous as turning up in an Eddie Stobart lorry with a nest of XL bullies in the trailer, so we were eager to come across as safe, if questionable in our choice of couple’s retreats.
Over drinks that night, we considered what to do with our time. There was an app, Cool’n Camp, in which you can organise your itinerary, or book La Source restaurant, which required reservations despite never having fewer than 35 spare tables. ‘Anything’s possible’ is the Eurocamp motto. I tried to reserve some bicycles for the next day. ‘C’est impossible,’ the app replied.
We were never going to spend hours by the pool. Any Eurocamp is based around its water slides and these are the jurisdiction of the camp cool kids. ‘When it comes to pools we have one rule. The wetter the better,’ Eurocamp’s website reads, puzzlingly. They actually have loads: no food and drink, no kids in the adult pool at certain hours, no bombing, no heavy petting, one at a time on the slides, and so on. 
Rather than run afoul of rules or cool kids, we kept away at the height of the day, instead swimming early, after I’d fetched baguettes and croissants from the camp shop operating largely on muscle memory. We’d then walk 40 minutes down the path to Sommières, the kind of absurdly quaint medieval village this area of France somehow has every few miles.
A little over 450 years ago, Catholic forces tried to suppress the Huguenots in Sommières. The locals managed to resist the attackers with hot irons and boiling oil, holding out for over two months, despite being heavily outnumbered and outgunned. The Siege of Sommières is said to have cost the royal army 2,500 men, and delayed them for months.
Happily, it is more welcoming to outsiders now. Hattie propped up the local economy with a visit to the Saturday morning brocante that seemed to last for longer than our entire trip. Riverside restaurants served steak frites and, for the vegetarians, steak frites sans le steak. The wine was so cheap, and so good, that we felt like we were somehow stealing it. Perhaps that was the case in the ’90s, too. I was more of a Panda Pop man back then.
Sommières was an escape, but every time we went out late, making our way back via the now firefly-lit path, we’d arrive to a stark reminder that, at Eurocamp, the night is owned by the teenagers. Huddled like covens around the glow of a phone, they’d eye us walking past, then giggle and return to their plan-hatching. Their parents sat on the terraces of their chalets smoking and drinking red wine over board games. We settled on our terrace. When at Eurocamp, do as the Eurocampers do.
A silence fell. Soon a squeaking was heard, before a small boy in a Germany football shirt cycled by on stabilisers. ‘Hallo,’ he said, sounding a little dazed. ‘Ah, hello,’ we replied. Off he went. Two minutes later he, and the squeaking, returned. ‘Hallo,’ he said, with the exact same look on his face. He lapped the block three more times, greeting everybody repeatedly. It felt like the beginning of a horror movie that would not end well for us. It was time for bed.
You don’t have to leave Eurocamp – ever – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. One afternoon, in 38C, and feeling my heart rate might slow to below 10 bpm if I sat and did nothing in the shade for any longer, I suggested we go for a drive. I then promptly scratched the rental car when the GPS suggested we do a U-turn in a road built for nothing wider than a goat. Cortisol? Spiked. Job done.
On a more successful excursion, we drove for an hour to the south, past olive trees weighed down with water bottles on strings, as if we’d caught them in the act of a marionette play. Our destination was the Mediterranean, which we found, along with a nature (and naturist) reserve. On another day, we found a swinging festival in Montpellier (that’s swing dancing, rather than the other kind, though a Venn Diagram of their respective clienteles would look like a circle) and a vineyard tour, only to discover the entire 60-minute session was to be conducted only in French.
Wherever we went, whatever we did, the camp called us back, just as it did 25 years ago. Everything was easier there. It had food, drink, fun, and the constant threat of that weird mascot appearing. I don’t remember exploring France very much as a child, but we probably did, we just cared more about getting back to the water slides and holiday friends.
I’m discovering that an essential part of growing older is coming to understand better and better the decisions your parents made, and holidays are one of the easiest, and maybe least traumatic, ways of walking in their shoes for a while. Mine wanted simplicity and somewhere we’d have the summer of our lives, however undeveloped and tacky our tastes were, while being entirely safe. They didn’t want to make decisions, and they especially didn’t want to worry.
They worked hard, so I imagine they also wanted somewhere you can untether completely, think ‘oh f—k it’, and order a Belgian lager the size of your head, knowing the kids will fetch the croissants in the morning. They wanted somewhere you can be happily institutionalised in less than four hours. If I ever have kids, I know where I’m taking them on holiday.
Seven nights from 2 July 2025 in a two-bed holiday home (sleeps four) starts from £728; eurocamp.co.uk 

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