Toujours Provence!

We had an amazing final day in this area.  We headed east into the heart of Provence - the Luberon mountain area.  We visited 4 really interesting places.  Get ready for a lot of really neat pictures.

The first place was called Villages des Bories and was up in the hills.  This open-air museum consisted of preserved buildings and walls (called bories) made entirely of dry laid stone with no mortar to hold them together.  The area was extremely rocky, obviously and the wood that was available was no good for building.  While the buildings we saw were inhibited from 1600 to about 1800, people had lived in this general location in similar structures since way before the romans, perhaps as much as 2000 years before the romans.  It was hard to figure out how they could build such high buildings with no ladders or scaffolding or anything.    They put a bunch of vertical stones on top of the walls to help weigh down the stones.  See the top left picture. Fascinating!

Then we roamed onward further into the mountains to visit the Abbey de Senanque and to see the lavender fields that surround it.  We first came upon the abbey when we were high on the mountain next to it and could look down on it and the lavender fields that surround it. (See top left corner picture to the left.)

If you have ever seen professional pictures of the lavenders fields, I swear they were taken here at this abbey.  The lavender had cooperated and gotten significantly more purple since we had last gone looking for lavender fields.  It was lovely - to look at and to smell. 

The abbey, built in 1148, was beautiful but we chose not to tour the inside - just admired it from the outside. 


Then we wondered through the hills back to the spectacular town of Gordes.  This is one of the primary tourist spots in the Luberon/Provence area and for good reason.  As you approach the town you start to get glimpses of its cliffside setting. 

It is a fairly typical hilltop town from the inside, but there is nothing typical about its setting or splendor from the outside.  We had a great lunch (pizza - yeah!) and checked out the market day stalls which were just packing up.  The views from within the town of the countryside around it were equally thrilling. 

One thing that was interesting about Gordes is that it was pretty much a ghost town until the 1960s.  When this area got discovered partly thanks to the great Avignon theatre festival and partly due to people travelling more, it was fairly quickly renovated and became a very high rent district.  It was clogged with traffic and tourists, but SO worth the trip.

After lunch we headed to Roussillon - about 10 kilometers away on another hill top.  What makes this town so different is the color - of the buildings and the ground and the red and orange cliffs that surround the town.  The hills are full of a mineral called ochre which was mined and quite valuable until WWII.  It's primarily used for pigment. 

The town is in the Luberon Parc Preserve and all development has been strictly controlled since 1943, so the town is gorgeous.  Every time we turned a corner I needed to take another picture.  The picture in the bottom right corner here shows a 150 year old grape vine - one that has not been pruned.  It was enormous - the picture doesn't do it justice.

I will spare you the bulk of the pictures that I took, but I know you will enjoy seeing a few of them.  It really was breath-taking - as were the views of the valleys around town.

The heat was bad today so we called it a day around 4 and headed home, did a little grocery shopping, rested and had dinner at home.  Tomorrow we will get up, pack and head to the sea!