Provence (Aix-en-Provence)

Top things to do in Provence (Aix-en-Provence)

1. 01

   Valensole plateau - the lavender rows in early summer

   scenic nature wildlife 👍 Popular

   A high, open tableland east of Manosque where the fields run to the horizon in corduroy rows, broken by the odd stone farmhouse and a line of almond trees. Most of what you see and smell here is lavandin, the sterile hybrid that yields heavily and grows in the big photogenic blocks; true fine lavender is a scrappier, greyer plant that does better on higher, poorer ground around Sault. The plateau colours from around the middle of June and the harvesters usually move in from about mid-July, so the window is short and shifts a week or two either way with the year. Come at first light: by ten the verges are lined with cars and every row has somebody standing in it.

2. 02

   Gordes and the Abbaye de Senanque - the cliff village and the lavender abbey

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   Gordes stacks up a limestone bluff in tiers of pale stone with a Renaissance castle at the top, and the view of it from the bend on the approach road is the single most photographed thing in the Luberon. Four kilometres down a hairpin lane sits Senanque, a Cistercian abbey founded in the middle of the 12th century, deliberately plain, still home to a community of monks, with a small lavender field in front of it that flowers from late June and produces the other image everyone recognises. Visits inside are by guided tour and the monks ask for quiet. Just outside Gordes, the Village des Bories preserves a cluster of drystone corbelled huts built without mortar.

3. 03

   Roussillon and the Sentier des Ocres - the pigment cliffs

   scenic nature wildlife ⭐ Highly recommended

   The Luberon sits on one of the richest ochre deposits in Europe, and at Roussillon a marked trail loops through the abandoned workings between pinnacles and gullies in every shade from butter yellow through orange to a deep blood red. The village above is rendered in the same pigments, house by house, which by local rule it has to be. Two loops run from the same gate, one short and one about twice as long, and both leave orange dust on your shoes for the rest of the trip. The old refining works below the village explains how the seams were washed, settled and fired, and the bigger, wilder version of the whole thing is at Rustrel a few kilometres east, known as the Colorado Provencal.

4. 04

   Les Baux-de-Provence and the Carrieres des Lumieres - the ruined citadel and the quarry projections

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   A fortress village welded to a limestone spur in the Alpilles, with a huge ruined castle behind it, siege engines on the plateau and a view over olive country to the Camargue. The rock underfoot gave its name to bauxite, first identified here. In a worked-out limestone quarry a few minutes below, the Carrieres des Lumieres projects an art programme across walls, floor and thirty-foot pillars with the sound turned up, which sounds gimmicky and is not: the scale of the chambers does the work. The village itself is small and takes a hammering in season, so go early or late and eat down in the valley.

5. 05

   Saint-Remy-de-Provence - Glanum and the asylum where Van Gogh painted

   history culture arts

   Two very different sites sit a short walk apart on the road south out of town. Glanum is a Greco-Roman town excavated out of a gap in the Alpilles, with paved streets, a spring sanctuary and, standing above ground on the far side of the road, a carved mausoleum and triumphal arch that never needed digging up at all. Opposite it, the cloister of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole is where Van Gogh admitted himself in May 1889 and worked through the year that produced the olive groves, the cypresses and the starry night; his room is reconstructed and the wheat field outside the wall is the one in the paintings. The town itself is one of the best-fed in Provence and the Wednesday market fills its whole ring road.

6. 06

   Arles - the Roman arena, the Saint-Trophime cloister and the Van Gogh trail

   history culture arts

   Arles backed Caesar against Marseille and was paid in stone. The amphitheatre still stands in the middle of the old town and still fills for bullfights and the Camargue-style races where the men try to take a rosette off the bull's horns; the Roman theatre next door is half-quarried away and used for concerts, and the Alyscamps is an avenue of stone sarcophagi leading out of town. Saint-Trophime adds a carved Romanesque portal and a cloister that is the best of its kind in the south. Van Gogh spent fifteen months here and painted furiously; the cafe terrace, the hospital courtyard and the Rhone bank are all marked, and there is a foundation showing his work alongside living artists. In summer a photography festival takes over the Roman and industrial spaces across the town.

7. 07

   Aix-en-Provence - Cours Mirabeau, the fountains and Cezanne's studio

   culture arts history

   The old capital of Provence and still the most civilised town in it: a broad avenue of plane trees laid out in the 1650s with grand houses down one side and cafes down the other, a warren of narrow streets behind it, and a hot spring that has been the reason for the place since the Romans. Water is the theme - fountains everywhere, including a mossy one halfway along the avenue that runs warm. There is a daily food market on the little square by the old grain hall, a serious fine-arts museum, and up on the hill north of the centre Cezanne's last studio has been kept as he left it, coats on the hook and skulls on the shelf. The local sweet is a diamond of almond and candied melon.

8. 08

   Montagne Sainte-Victoire - the ridge Cezanne painted over and over

   scenic adventure

   A long white limestone wall east of Aix that changes colour through the day and gave Cezanne the subject he returned to in dozens of oils and watercolours until the year he died. Paths climb from the Tholonet side to the cross on the summit ridge in a few hours, steep and stony with no shade and no water, and the view runs to the Alps on a clear day. Picasso bought the chateau at Vauvenargues under the north face and is buried in its grounds. The massif is one of the areas where forest access is restricted on high-risk summer days, so check the rating before you set out.

9. 09

   L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue - the antique dealers on the canals

   shopping culture arts

   A town built on branches of the Sorgue, with mossy wooden waterwheels still turning in the channels that once drove silk and paper mills. It is now the biggest concentration of antique dealers in France outside Paris, spread across permanent villages of stalls in old factories along the river, open at weekends and busiest on Sunday when the general market runs at the same time and the whole place jams. Two big international fairs a year pull dealers from across Europe. Even if you buy nothing, the combination of green water, brocante and a Sunday morning is one of the region's real pleasures.

10. 10

    The Provencal markets - Wednesday in Saint-Remy, Saturday in Apt, Friday in Lourmarin

    food shopping ⭐ Highly recommended

    The market is the regional institution, and each town has its day: Saint-Remy on Wednesday, Apt and Arles on Saturday, Lourmarin on Friday, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue on Sunday, and a food market every morning in Aix. What separates them from a tourist market is that locals still shop them for the week - trays of olives and tapenade, sheep and goat cheeses, spit-roast chickens, melons in high summer, the first asparagus in spring, herbs by the sack, and long tables of Provencal cotton that you should probably resist. Go early, take cash and a basket, and plan lunch immediately afterwards.

11. 11

    Rose from the Coteaux d'Aix and the reds of the southern Rhone

    food

    This is the region that made pale dry rose a serious wine rather than an apology, and it is drunk here all day, cold, with everything. The vineyards nearest Aix and the Var coast are the rose heartland, Bandol makes dark tannic reds from mourvedre that age for years, and Cassis makes a white built for shellfish. North towards the Rhone the wines get big and warm: Chateauneuf-du-Pape on its bed of round stones, Gigondas and Vacqueyras under the limestone teeth of the Dentelles de Montmirail. Estates across all of it take visitors for tastings, usually without an appointment on weekdays, and most will ship.

12. 12

    Black truffles and the winter markets at Richerenches and Carpentras

    food

    From about the middle of November to the middle of March the oak scrub of the Vaucluse gives up the black truffle, and the trade is a genuine sight in itself. Richerenches holds the biggest wholesale market in the country on Saturday mornings, dealt out of car boots and canvas bags with almost no ceremony and a smell you can find from the far end of the street; Carpentras runs its own on Friday. Restaurants across the region put up truffle menus for the season, and it is the strongest argument there is for coming in the months when everything else is shut.

13. 13

    Fontaine-de-Vaucluse - the spring at the foot of the cliff

    nature wildlife scenic

    The Sorgue does not begin as a trickle: it comes out from under a cliff at the head of a blind valley, one of the most powerful karst springs in the world, draining a plateau the size of a small county through cave systems nobody has fully mapped. In spring it can boil up over the terrace and roar; by late summer it drops to a still green pool and the water emerges further down the boulders instead. Petrarch spent years living here in the 14th century writing to Laura, which is why a village of six hundred people has a museum about him.

Getting to & around Provence (Aix-en-Provence)

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