Roussillon stands on a ridge in the heart of the Luberon, and the whole village is the colour of the ground it stands on — because it is built from it. The houses are washed in every shade the cliffs below them hold: blood red, apricot, burnt orange, pale gold. For two centuries this was a pigment town, and the colour never left.
I. The village the colour of its cliffs
Climb to the Castrum at the top for the view, then come down through the lanes — a façade in oxblood, the next in saffron, shutters the green of old copper. Roussillon is one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France, and unusually it earns the title at street level rather than from a postcard distance.
“The houses are painted with the hill itself — there is no other palette here.”
II. Walking the Sentier des Ocres
Below the village the Sentier des Ocres loops through the old quarries — a short marked walk between cliffs and chimneys of raw pigment, the Chaussée des Géants rising in pillars of rust and gold. Wear nothing you mind staining; the dust gets into everything, which is rather the point. The path closes in winter and on wet days.
III. Ôkhra and the trade that made the colour
On the road to Apt, the old Usine Mathieu ochre works is now Ôkhra, a conservatory of colour where you can see how the pigment was washed, settled and fired. For more raw landscape, the Colorado Provençal at Rustrel, a few kilometres east, opens a wider canyon of the same fierce earth.
