Les Baux rides a spur of white rock in the heart of the Alpilles, a village and a ruined fortress so fused with the stone that from below you cannot tell where the cliff ends and the walls begin. It is one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France, and it gave its name to the mineral first found here — bauxite, the ore of aluminium.
I. The fortress on the rock
The Château des Baux spreads across the top of the spur, a vast medieval ruin of towers, keep and rock-cut chambers with siege engines on the terraces and the whole plain of the Alpilles falling away below. Beneath it the village proper is a single climbing street of honey stone, Renaissance houses and small squares — best walked early, before the day fills it.
“You cannot tell where the cliff ends and the castle begins — they are the same white stone.”
II. The Carrières de Lumières
Just below the village, the old limestone quarries — galleries cut in sheer white walls thirty feet high — have become the Carrières de Lumières, where a whole painter’s work is projected across floor, walls and ceiling to music. Van Gogh, Cézanne, Klimt: each year a new show fills the cavern with moving colour. It is the most extraordinary art experience in the South, and the coolest place to be on a hot day.
III. The Alpilles around it
Les Baux sits at the heart of the Alpilles, the small dry limestone range of olive groves and garrigue that gives one of France’s finest olive oils, the Vallée des Baux AOC. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is fifteen minutes north; the whole massif is laced with walking and cycling roads through pine and rock.
