A flamboyance of flamingos was feeding on plankton in a reed-lined marsh. The water reflected their lithe bodies beneath clouds the color of their plumage, blushed by the setting sun. Suddenly, my guide told me to grab my binoculars: Black silhouettes of cows waded through the marsh like hippos in the Serengeti. I had never seen cattle so graceful in the water. This aquatic ballet perfectly summed up the Camargue.

Set in the largest delta in Western Europe, the Camargue, a rustic region of France where the Rhone River meets the Mediterranean Sea, has more water than land and more bulls than people. Thousands of birds migrate to its nutrient-dense terrain. It’s a colorful mosaic: verdant farmland, blue lagoons, sandy beaches and white salt mounds sprouting from marshes tinged pink by microscopic shrimp. “The landscape changes every day,” said my guide, Jean-Yves Boulithe, 56. Yet the Camarguais culture, of fishermen and mustachioed cowboys called gardians, gives the feeling that time stopped at the turn of the 20th century — as do the limited Wi-Fi and cell service.

The Camargue is best experienced in the slow lane, which I kept in mind as I rented a car in Marseille last April for a grand tour of the region, which hugs the coast about halfway between Marseille and Montpellier, south of the tourist hub of Arles. I had been warned about the whipping mistral wind and mosquitoes that keep less rugged travelers away. I had remembered to pack footwear that could get muddy, since many areas are accessible only on foot, in a saddle or on a bike.

A land of salt and mosquitoes

Near Arles, the Rhone splits into two branches, the Petit and Grand, and in this wishbone sits the roughly 300-square-mile Île de Camargue. The Rhone’s yearly floods have menaced the island ever since Phocaean traders and farmers arrived there from Marseille in 600 B.C. In 1869, Napoleon III completed a system of sea dikes and river canals that controlled the floods but transformed the landscape.