Chestnuts roasting on an open fire: Autumn festival time in Europe

By Nicole Jankowski Aug 24, 2010, 12:23 GMT

Collobrieres, France - The smoke from countless fires is wafting through the small French mountain village of Collbrieres, mixed in with the aroma of roasting chestnuts.

In a manner certain to get the attention of passersby, vendors are flipping the chestnuts up into the air from large iron frying pans. The roasted morsels are served, still piping hot, in paper bags. You can eat them as you walk along to the next attraction.

The chestnut festival in Collobrieres, a region inland from the Cote d'Azur, is one of the best-known ones in France. More than 30,000 visitors come each October to the 'Fetes de la Chataigne' in the Mauren mountain range of the Provence.

The festivities this year are set for the Sundays of October 17, 24 and 31, when the entire town of Collobrieres will be closed off to traffic. Outside the town limits, cars will be lined up for kilometres.

The Provence is not the only region in France where festivals are dedicated to edible chestnuts. In the Ardeche region the 'Castagnades' are staged from mid-October to early November, and in many restaurants chestnuts hold sway on the menus.

Later on, the festivities move onwards, to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, where in mid-December in the village of Bocognano, located in the idyllic high-elevation valley of Gravona, people are invited to the chestnut market.

For centuries, the nutritional, high-calorie 'bread of the poor' had been a vital basic foodstuff in many regions of Europe.

In the meantime, the edible chestnut has gained in stature and is now regarded as a delicacy and is undergoing a kind of renaissance. The culinary re-discovery is also celebrated in other European vacation regions during the autumn.

For example, villagers in the Galicia region of western Spain gather together at campfires for their 'Magostos' festival, while in the southern Andalusian region of southern Spain they celebrate what is called the 'fiesta de la castana.'

Chestnut festivals are also held everywhere from the Atlantic island of Madeira to the Croatian town of Lovran on the south-eastern Istrian coast. And in the town of Piancastagnaio, vacationers in Italy's Tuscany region can still take part in the local chestnut festival in November.

In the South Tyrollean region of northern Italy, the locals call chestnuts 'keschtn' where they are the focus of the 'chestnut-days' festival in the towns of Voellan and Tisens this year from October 17 to 31.

Visitors will see the traditional 'keschtnriggl,' a hand-held wickerwork cylinder made of chestnut wood and inside which roasted chestnuts are shaken to remove their shells.

In Switzerland, the chestnuts are called 'marronis' and visitors can find particularly large expanses of chestnut forests in the Tessin region.

A special chestnut trail in the town of Arosio informs visitors about the chestnut culture in the Luganersee lake region. In Ascona, the annual chestnut festivities take place in October. In the Vallais region, the town of Fully each year stages a chestnut fest on its central market square.

Autumn is also the time for the 'Keschde' in the Pfaelzerwald forest in the Palatinate area of western Germany. It was the Romans who, along with wine, introduced the Mediterranean plant to the Palatinate region - or at least that's the legend.

The start of the annual festival season are the 'chestnut days' in the Trifelsland area and in the town of Annweiler on the Trifels River in early October.

The highlight event is the 'Keschdefeschd' (chestnut fest) in Hauenstein in mid-October. In the regional cuisine, a hearty meal would consist of a chestnut soup, fried sausage, sow belly, dumplings and cakes, washed down by a white wine.

But visitors can also try chestnuts in liquid form - distilled as a brandy or liqueur or brewed as a beer. But naturally, one can still simply consume a chestnut pure and still hot from the fire.