Gordes climbs a rock face on the northern edge of the Luberon, its houses piled in dry pale stone so that the whole village seems carved from the cliff rather than built on it. From the road below it is one of the great sights of Provence — a town that holds to its hill like a single grey-gold mass, the château at the crown.
I. The village that grew from the rock
Walk up through the calades, the steep cobbled ramps, past vaulted passages and the Renaissance château on the summit. Gordes is one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France, and the pleasure is in the climb — the light off the limestone, the valley opening behind you at every turn. Below the village, the Village des Bories gathers a hamlet of dry-stone huts, built without mortar, that kept shepherds and their tools for centuries.
“The town does not sit on the hill — it is the hill, dressed in windows.”
II. Sénanque, the abbey in the fold
A few kilometres north, the road drops into a narrow valley and the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque appears below — a Cistercian abbey founded in 1148, still home to a community of monks. In front of its plain Romanesque church the lavender is planted in long rows that flower in late June and July, the most photographed image in Provence and, in the early morning before the coaches, still one of the most beautiful.
III. The plateau and the stone country around it
Gordes sits at the edge of high open country — the plateau de Vaucluse, the perched villages of Roussillon and Joucas, the Sunday market town of Apt. It is the obvious base for the northern Luberon: close enough to Sénanque for the dawn light, high enough to watch the whole valley change colour as the day turns.
