We are looking to buy a smallholding / house with some land and I was wondering why property in Limousin and surrounds is so much cheaper than elsewhere in France. Then I came across articles about the uranium mines north of Limoges and other scary stories about contamination of Lac du Saint-Perdoux, etc.
Anybody here have any experiences or insights to share?
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Its all lies, and the Limousin is full up now anyway!
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Not according to all the property websites!
Cold, wet, miles from anywhere, not for nothing were useless army officers sent to Limoges to twiddle their thumbs while their career went down the drain.
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Sorry I actually meant experiences of nuclear accidents or waste contamination. Hence the thread titleā¦
Just google āradioactivitĆ© Limousinā or āradioactivitĆ© Haute-Vienneā you should find lots of articles. Possibly swimming in the lac de Saint-Pardoux will turn you into a ready-brek child but who knows. Probably swings and roundabouts, you might make screens light up as you go by but you wonāt get covid seeing thereās nobody to catch it from (like the Creuse) and thereās less pollution of other sorts I imagine.
I am not being entirely serious, however.
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There is a lot of cheap property as a lot of it needs a lot of work. Once thatās done it is not cheap at all.
It is a really beautiful area though.
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Do you reply āJust Google itā to everyone who posts something on this website? Of course I could do that but I thought this was supposed to be a helpful community of people who live in France giving info to others. Maybe Iām mistaken.
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Yes from what Iāve seen it does look really beautiful.
Plenty of radon from the granite, and all the old folk here in the Creuse probable avarage age 90 ish, it kills then the odd one. Lovely place to live.
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@anon3065310 I donāt think there are many SFers living in the Limousin to be honest which is why there may be a gap in the flow recommendations.
We live fairly close by in the East Charente and when we ave ventured out in to indian territory, we have managed to get back without being scalped 
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Cheaper probably because it is in the middle of nowhere, relatively wet and doesnāt attract the casual second home owner. At least there is the TGV, which is more than can be said for the Auvergne. There is also an airport that serves a number of destinations in the summer .
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Thanks guys for the helpful feedback.
If you go a bit further south down the A20, I think youāll find that the Aveyron/Lot/Cantal border is cheaper, the vernacular architecture is more interesting, the landscape is more spectacular and the climate is certainly better.
Itās not on the TGV and is a couple of hours more to drive to Paris, but on the other hand, itās a similar amount closer to the Med, Spain and Barcelona .
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Cheers Mark, Iāll definitely take a look.
I am a grumpy French person not from the Limousin, who happens to drive through every so often. There is a huge amount of stuff online but Iām not sure how many people here actually live in Limousin. I live 155km south of Limoges and the prevailing winds are from the west so I donāt feel I need an NBC suit to go outside. I believe you can get a Geiger counter quite cheaply nowadays 
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We lived in a village in the Limousin, about 30 miles north of Limoges, which had a closed down uranium mine right on the edge of it. The mine was finished and was being left to fill up with water, and the land surrounding it was being returned to itās natural state. The village had benefitted greatly from the taxes paid by the mining company and had used the money to make lots of great improvements including mains drainage, underground electric cables, a fabulous new village hall and football pitch. The villageās water was supplied from a local spring and there was no contamination whatsoever from the mine. Nobody seemed to have suffered ill health because of it. We were made very welcome in the village and integrated well with the locals, joining the Comite des Fetes and helping to run the football team. The Limousin is a beautiful, very rural area.
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Beautiful and warm in the summer but very wet in the spring and autumn and freezing during the interminable winterā¦ as well as being a long long est from anywhere. As elsewhere there are are always good reasons why property prices are lower than generally expected.
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I do not recognise your description of the weather/seasons. Perhaps you live in other parts of the Limousin. We are 45km north of Limoges, it is not particularly wet in the spring time, the summers are long, usually well into October. The autumn is mild and the merge into winter is hardly noticeable. Whilst winter can sometimes be cold it is not terribly so. The spring flowers are spouting and some are even in bud and some in flower. I have not yet found a reason to move out of shorts, in fact the last time I wore a pair of trousers was last January and that was to go to a Michelin starred resto.
I do not quite get the comment about it being the ālongest from anywhereā, three hours to Paris, four hours to Lyon, three hours to Toulouse and another couple to Spain and less that three hours to the coast. Seems pretty central. That apart, it is a beautiful area with low property prices and a low cost of living. I highly recommend it.
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Thank you Geoff. I was really wondering about other posts talking about it being wet and cold and miserable and miles from anywhereā¦ Not what Iāve read about it anywhere else!