After 50 years Asterix and his village of indomitable Gauls are still gamely holding out against the Romans, while in the meantime they have become a global publishing phenomenon.
Despite their defiantly French character, the comic book adventures of the first century BC warrior have sold 325 million copies -- 200 million of them abroad -- and been translated into 107 languages and dialects.
The 20-year-old Asterix theme park outside Paris rivals even the same city`s Disneyland as a tourist draw and a series of hit movies, including both live action and animated capers, have been worldwide hits.
This month`s anniversary will be a huge event in France, with the launch of the 34th book -- a celebratory retrospective -- and major events in the capital and in Brittany, where several villages claim to be the hero`s home.
Asterix`s creators, the late writer Rene Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo, have never identified a single site as the inspiration for the village, a Gaullish hamlet in a forest by the sea besieged by Caesar`s legions.
The map on the first page of every Asterix book shows the village in close up under a magnifying glass, thus obscuring its exact location, but in Erquy, on the Breton peninsula`s rocky northern coast, they have no doubts.
"You see these three rocks? They`re the same as those you see under the magnifying glass!" declares Jean-Pierre Allain, the picturesque fishing port`s retired bookseller and passionate amateur archaeologist.
There are other clues. Hiking maps record a nearby site called "Caesar`s camp", and locals insist a lighthouse on the jetty looks remarkably like the one on page four of Asterix`s 1971 adventure "The Mansions of the Gods".
"Asterix`s village is here," declares Manuel Mendes, a stonemason whose girth resembles that of Obelix, Asterix`s huge comrade, a warrior so strong he can carry Brittany`s menhirs -- prehistoric standing stones.
A granite statue of Mendes` hero stands outside his business, celebrating the village`s pride but also pointing to the massive commercial potential for any resort that becomes recognised as Asterix`s home.
Accordingly, several other villages have also claimed the title, including one in nearby Normandy and one hundreds of 460 kilometres (285 miles) away in the Calais region. "That`s not very likely," snorts Allain.
Since the first story in 1959, Uderzo has drawn the village -- with its stone huts, Fulliautomatix the blacksmith`s forge, Unhygenix the fishmonger`s stall and Cacophonix the bard`s treehouse -- hundreds of times.
He took a helicopter flight over Erquy in 1996 and afterwards admitted that he might have "unconsciously" modelled his vision on the area`s rocky cape and sandy bay, before later insisting the village was purely imaginary.
Erquy will therefore have to content itself with being an unofficial draw for the Gaul`s fanatic devotees, unlike Parc Asterix outside Paris, which drew 1.8 million visitors last year despite the economic crisis.
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