Picardie

The region of Picardy is mostly famous for its first and second world war battlegrounds, especially the Somme. The region is relatively flat and has 23 miles of coastal strip around the river Somme. Amiens is the regions capital and has a beautiful Cathedral which was build to house the head of St John the Baptist, brought back from the Crusades in 1206. The south of Picardie (historically part of Ile-de-France) is a very scenic hilly area with large forests.

As the historical Picardy was deemed too small to become a region, the French government decided to join it with the north of Ile-de-France. The name of the historical province of Picardy was given to this new region.

Thus, the Picardie region is somewhat an artificial region, with the south of the Oise department lying inside the metropolitan area of Paris. People in the south of Oise commute to Ile-de-France for work, and hardly feel Picard.

The main crops of Picardy are wheat, sugar beets and fodder. Sugar beet was introduced by Napoleon during the Napoleonic Wars in order to counter the United Kingdom which had seized the sugar islands possessed by France in the Caribbean.

The sugar industry made the fortune of Picardy in the 19th century and contributed to the ruin of the sugar economy in the Caribbean.

A minority of people still speak the Picard language, one of the languages of France, which is also spoken in Artois (Nord-Pas de Calais region)

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