Seduced by Provence

A week in Provence is enough to seduce one, and to understand why painters like van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse and Picasso came here for the intense colours, brilliant sunshine and quality of life. 

This post is a mélange, a medley, of some of my favourite scenes of villages in the Luberon region ...  

Many old settlements in this region were originally built as fortified villages high up on rocky hilltops - the villages perchés - for the strategic vantage point they gave. They had castles and fortifications and narrow entrances.

In our own village of Goult, above and below - stone archways and ramparts and the ornately carved entrance to the gardens of the castle that tops the village. The pic below right shows the castle walls rising seamlessly from the natural rock below.

Day to day life could not have been easy in these villages - imagine the difficulties of getting water and basic amenities up to those heights - but today we can appreciate the fantastic views of surrounding countryside and the still preserved medieval houses in steep, winding, narrow stone streets.

This high-up window (below right) of a huge room in the castle (now a chateau available for rent - imagine that!) caught my fancy - it must have fabulous views across the valley ...

This is Gordes, glowing below on its hilltop perch on a summer evening last week. Gordes has an impressive 2000 year history. Like Goult, it's topped by a church and castle - the twin symbols of protection against enemies, though as recently as World War II it suffered badly, with a large part of the village being destroyed and the population massacred. The whole village was awarded the Croix de Guerre medal. 

Lately it's been a favourite destination for film directors, artists (a 16th century chateau houses a large art collection) and Parisiens (Mitterand famously had a summer home here for his mistress Anne Pingeot). Below is the hotel La Renaissance in front of the chateau, where many scenes from A Good Year were filmed ...

Ménerbes (below), another village perché, has the dubious blessing of being the village Peter Mayle chose to live in and write his first best-seller about Provence life ...

And not too far away, this is the view from the fortified village of Bonnieux over orchards, vineyards and a forest of cedars ...

... and a side view, below, of the fortified ramparts against attackers in the Middle Ages. This place was a stronghold for the Knights Templar for a long time ...

While Gordes and Ménerbes were gorgeous but perhaps just a tad too staged or like film-sets, Bonnieux seemed to have a local life of its own. I got side-tracked (stopped dead in my tracks and drawn inside like a magnet, I mean) by the antique shops (I loved this carved bed-head leaning against a centuries-old stone wall, below) ...

... and by the numbers of restaurants and cafés, each one more inviting than the one before (we ended up choosing Le Fournil, below right, for lunch on the cobbled terrace surrounding an old fountain, and did not regret it). In Bonnieux we also came across a man with an extraordinary collection of vintage French film posters and memorabilia, which he was selling in a tiny, chaotic shop.

Could Lourmarin be the prettiest of them all? Not a perched village, but down at the foot of the Luberon mountain, surrounded by vineyards and olive groves, it's officially designated one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France ...

Camus lived here, and this (below) is his very unassuming grave in the local churchyard. He died (appropriately for an absurdist/existentialist, non?) in a random car crash while driving from Lourmarin to Paris ...

There isn't a street or alleyway here that's not picture-perfect or full of intriguing doorways and tiny shops ...

or outdoor cafés ...

But my favourite sight was in the lane outside La Boutique de l'Antiquaire (owned by Corey's friend Nathalie of La Madone - another fabulous place to stay in Provence) ... a table set for one in front of a vintage Citroen deux chevaux ...

Doesn't this capture French Provençal style?