6 THINGS YOU DO IN... VAUCLUSE
ROMANS REMAIN
Vaucluse comes from the Latin for ‘closed valley’, referring to the 750fthigh cliff face above the deepest spring in France, at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. The Roman presence is all around Vaucluse, including its main city of Avignon and the town of Orange.
But don’t miss one lesserknown site, Vaison-la-Romaine. Its remains include a Roman bridge over the River Ouveze, built in the 1st Century. It features a rare, single semi-circular arch with a 54ft span and is still in use.
VILLAGE LIFE
Some of the finest villages in
France are in Vaucluse, including Lourmarin, Seguret and the medieval walled settlement of Venasque. Gordes is a spiral of old stone houses under terracotta roof tiles. The French express civic pride in many ways, but I particularly liked the solution in the tiny village of Suzette. They couldn’t afford a library, so villagers rescued a telephone booth, repainted it and transformed it into a reading cabin.
HILLTOP HOSTS
I HAVE never found anything as perfectly rooted in its environment as Hotel Crillon le Brave. The owners took a huddle of hilltop buildings in the tiny hamlet of the same name and turned it into an elegant maze of rooms, stone stairs and narrow passages. There’s a cosy lounge, the two restaurants, a terrace with sensational views, a spa and a boules pitch. From our tower room at the top, fitted with two free-standing baths, we looked down on a sea of vineyards and olive groves.
BIG CHEESE
Our hotel promoted the ‘experience’ – an excursion curated just for you. We chose to base ours around cheese. Our first call was Madame Vigier’s Aladdin’s cave of a cheese shop in Carpentras. We then followed our guide and Mme Vigier up winding roads to the farm of one of her suppliers, where we were given a demonstration in goats’ cheese making.
A more conventional visit is to little Isle sur la Sorgue, where branches of the River Sorgue meet. Water wheels, narrow streets and stairs down to old washing wells add distinction. The time to visit is any weekend, when the town is transformed into one of Europe’s biggest centres for antiques and secondhand items.
GIANT OF PROVENCE
Mont Ventoux, the stand-alone mountain topped with a great, white cone of bare limestone, is visible for miles. The climb to the 6,272ft summit is one of the toughest tests for Tour de France riders such as Chris Froome. If you fancy tackling it on foot, one walk begins in the village of Malaucene where the poet Petrarch, in 1336, claimed to be the first ‘tourist’ to climb a mountain for pleasure.
BLACK GOLD
NO trip to Provence is complete without hunting for glorious black truffles. The Saturday morning truffle market in the village of Richerenches is the place to experience this gastronomic phenomenon during the season, between November and March.
For further information, visit crillonlebrave.com and avignon-tourisme.com. Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com) fly from Dublin to Montpellier.