Lagamas

Lagamas (L'Agamàs) is a commune in the Hérault département in the Occitanie region in southern France.

Geography


This commune is located in the Languedoc-Roussillon region, in the Hérault département, in the canton of Gignac. The village is part of the 4th constituency of Hérault.

Climate
In 2020, Météo-France published a typology of climates in mainland France in which the commune is exposed to a Mediterranean climate and is in the Provence, Languedoc-Roussillon climatic region, characterised by low rainfall in summer, very good sunshine (2,600 h/year), a hot summer 21.5 °C, very dry air in summer, dry in all seasons, strong winds (frequency of 40 to 50% of winds > 5 m/s) and little fog.

For the period 1971-2000, the average annual temperature was 14.3 °C with an annual temperature range of 16.5 °C. The average annual total rainfall is 849 mm, with 6.8 days of precipitation in January and 3.1 days in July. For the period 1991-2020, the average annual temperature observed at the nearest weather station, located in the commune of Saint-André-de-Sangonis, 3 km away as the crow flies, is 15.5 °C and the average annual total rainfall is 652.4 mm. For the future, climate parameters for the municipality estimated for 2050 according to different greenhouse gas emission scenarios can be consulted on a dedicated website published by Météo-France in November 2022.

Land use
The commune's land use, as revealed by the European biophysical land cover database Corine Land Cover (CLC), is characterised by the importance of agricultural land (96.9% in 2018), an increase compared to 1990 (77%). The detailed breakdown in 2018 is as follows: permanent crops (56.5%), heterogeneous agricultural areas (40.4%), forests (3%). Changes in land use in the municipality and its infrastructure can be seen on various maps of the area: the Cassini map (eighteenth century), the carte d'état-major (1820-1866) and IGN maps or aerial photos for the current period (1950 to the present).

Population
Changes in the number of inhabitants are known from population censuses carried out in the commune since 1793. For communes with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, a census of the entire population is carried out every five years, with the legal populations for the intervening years estimated by interpolation or extrapolation. For the commune, the first exhaustive census under the new system was carried out in 2005.

In 2021, the commune had a population of 110, unchanged from 2015 (Hérault: +7.29%, France excluding Mayotte: +1.84%).

Architecture
The church, Notre-Dame de la Garrigue, was built by Élodie Martin, the widow of the textile magnate Jean-Pierre Balsan as a homage to her husband. The Balsan family is known to have inhabited Lagamas since at least 1576. The church, with its unusual gothic style, is a miniature inspired by the Châteauroux cathedral, a city where the Balsan family had acquired the Manufacture Royale de Drap de Châteauroux in 1856.

The church was completed in around 1874. An extensive renovation was finalised in 2007.

The same widow built the large mansion facing the church, known locally as the château. It hosts an annual multi-disciplinary artist residency organised by the Cornelius Arts Foundation.