We noticed how colorful the houses were as we drove through the area around our campground. I mean really colorful--fushia, lime, pink, bright blue, baby blue, midnight blue, purple, sunshine yellow, lavender, and I'm sure I missed a few. Also some of these houses had more than one of these colors on them.
I asked Dan Rose, the owner of the campground, about this. Of course, there is history to this! Gaspe has fishing and tourism as their main industry, and tourism only more recently as an earlier blog entry describes. Also agriculture is very limited as this is a beautiful, but harsh land. Consequently, most of the year many folks have no income other than what comes from the Canadian unemployment compensation.
So, in early spring, folks who are needing to paint their homes, go to the paint store and buy what is on sale and the amount of paint that they can afford. If lime is on sale, that is your color. But, they have only enough money for part of the job. Next spring, you guessed it, they go back to the paint store for paint that is on sale, and, you guessed it again, lime is not on sale this year, but purple is. So we paint another part of the house purple and so on and so on.
Dan, said until more recently, they never painted the back of their houses since no one could see back there.
However, once the folks realized that economics could improve if they could bring more tourists to the area, they did and their economy improved somewhat. They bought televisions for the long winters and learned that white houses apparently (I never realized this) meant you had arrived. Now many houses are painted white, but I will tell you those colorful houses bring character to Gaspe. I figured, they did it because it really brightened (really brightened) up the landscape in the long, cold, dreary, winters in the Gaspe. - tg
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