Simon Calder: 'Reports of the demise of the British visitor to France are wide of the mark'

France: so near and yet so far from our thoughts when choosing a holiday. Look: 70 per cent of British travellers who take a foreign trip each year opt for somewhere other than France. Last year British travellers voted with their passports to shift further south: for the first time, fractionally more opted for Spain than France. And Ryanair, the no-frills airline that has done so much to fuel property-buying in provincial France, is continuing to cut back routes. After erasing some of the former Buzz routes when it took over the ailing airline last year, this month it abandons flights from Stansted to the fine cities of Reims and Clermont-Ferrand.

Have we fallen out of love with French beaches, countryside or food? No, but the British have always been promiscuous travellers. If the price is right (as it was last year in Spain), we will forsake les plages for las costas. Superb countryside in Austria and Italy is now extremely easy to reach thanks to no-frills airlines, and British palates are seeking stimulation in Turkey, Thailand and all points east.

In one respect, France can do very nicely without us. Even without the help of the 12 million UK travellers who took French leave last year, the nation was still the most popular tourist destination on the planet for international visitors: 63m arrive from elsewhere around the globe.

Who are the most assiduous Francophiles of all? The French themselves, who know bonnes vacances when they see them. Many millions stay within their frontiers for the month of August.

But reports of the demise of the British visitor to France are even wider of the mark than premature notices of Mark Twain's death. For every minute of every hour of every day in 2004, an average of 20 British travellers will visit France. (That is not counting the millions of shoppers who cruise to Calais for the day pour les achats, nor the many thousands of soccer fans who will drive for hundreds of miles along the A10 on the long haul south via Spain to Portugal for Euro 2004.)

The main attractions are as, well, attractive as ever: the beaches of Brittany and Gascony, the Alps, the towns of Provence and the Dordogne. And we'll always have Paris as our numéro un city, not least because of the acceleration in Eurostar services to the capital. At just 155 minutes by rail from central London, Paris Gare du Nord is closer than Durham, Manchester and Swansea. But increasingly, British travellers are discovering their own versions of la vraie France: great cathedral cities such as Chartres and Troyes, spectacular mountain scenery speckled with medieval villages in the Pyrénées, even the absurdly accessible Côte d'Opale between Calais and Boulogne. We are seeking out regional cuisine and wine - and in the process discovering that Alsace-Lorraine and France's Basque Country are gastronomic laws unto themselves.

"It has been said that every man has two countries - his own and France," wrote E Hope Samson in Everybody's Pocket Travel Guide to France, a book published so long ago that the nation attracted only three million visitors a year, some of whom travelled third class from London via Newhaven and Dieppe to Paris. This journey took about four times as long as the present Eurostar service. This year, from the cultural thrills of Lille in the far north to the sultry climes of southern Corsica, France is more accessible - and seductive - than ever.