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The Lubéron is an especially picturesque region of Provence.
Between the Alps and the Mediterranean, it’s green and rural. Its many
hilltops are dotted with “perched villages” that maintain much of
their medieval appearance. It is here that you can perhaps get the
best feeling of what agrarian Europe must have looked like the 14th
century, with insular (and defensible) villages surrounded by
farmland.
Gordes is probably the best known and most “typical” of the perched
villages. Which is probably why, at the height of summer, it’s the most
overrun with tourists. Still, it makes a very attractive sight from a
distance, offering another one of those views that shows no evidence of
the 21st century (if you wait until the cars and tour buses are out of
the picture).
Roussillon is a similarly “typical” (and, admittedly, similarly
touristy) Lubéron village. But it’s uniquely attractive and
photogenic because of the surrounding ochre cliffs. The Romans used
the multi-colored earth for pottery glazes; later artists used the
ochre for paint pigments. Today most of the buildings in the village
are made from colored local stones, or painted in bright ochre colors.
Yes, it’s strictly for the tourists (other Lubéron villages are
built of white or pale yellow stones). But it still makes for many
interesting pictures.
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The village church and its bell tower. |
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Blue window shutters contrast with red ochre. |
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A living floral bouquet in the main square. |
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Near Bonnieux is the Pont Julien, a Roman bridge probably built in
the 1st century CE. It was part of the Via Domitia, the road
between Italy and Spain. The impressive thing about this bridge is
that, as part of the highway between Apt and Avignon, it carries
cars and trucks. After 2,000 years, with the only “re-engineering”
being extensions at either end to meet up with the modern road, it’s
solid enough to carry constant traffic far heavier than its designer
could have even imagined. But it’s worth noting that, of the
many similar bridges on the Via Domitia, this is the only one
that has survived. Maybe sheer luck matters more than solid
engineering.
The village of Moustiers Sainte Marie is set on a rocky ledge under
mountainous cliffs. It’s in the Haute-Provence region between
the Lubéron and Nice, the last stop on this “virtual tour.”
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