Alpilles

The Alpilles form a range of white limestone, narrow and low, set across the plain between the Rhône valley and that of the Durance. Seen from a distance, it looks more like a rocky ridge than a proper massif: its bare crests, cut through with dry combes, stand out sharply against the farmland surrounding it on every side. That shortness is deceptive — the rock here is every bit as steep as in a real mountain, simply shorter, and the villages backed against it benefit from the same defensive terrain as peaks far higher. The vegetation covering the slopes is that of the garrigue: thyme, rosemary, holm oak and juniper grow in poor, stony ground, between bare limestone walls. On the lower land, olive groves have occupied the foot of the range for centuries, laid out in terraces wherever the slope demands it. The mistral, which drops down through the Rhône corridor, strikes the region with a regularity that farming has long since built into itself: farmhouses face away from it, and rows of cypress, planted along the edge of the fields, serve as windbreaks as much as landmarks in the landscape. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, at the foot of the northern side, keeps the ruins of Glanum, an ancient town of which an arch and a mausoleum still stand beside the road leading into the Alpilles; it was in this same countryside that Van Gogh painted the cypresses and olive trees that fill a good part of his late work. Les Baux-de-Provence occupies the other side: the village clings to a rocky spur overlooking the plain, beneath a ruined castle and above old stone quarries whose workings gave their name to a red mineral first identified there, bauxite. The region's typical house, the mas provençal, answers directly to this climate: thick stone walls, few openings on the north face, a shallow-pitched tiled roof, and a row of cypress planted as shelter on the side of the prevailing wind. A stay in the Alpilles is built around short distances between villages, farmers' markets and walks along the ridges, from which the view takes in the Crau plain to the east as readily as the Rhône valley to the west. People readily stay in an isolated farmhouse among the olive groves, away from the nearest village, or in a village house with the blue or green shutters typical of the region. Days are organised around shade: that of a plane tree on a square, that of a trellis in a courtyard, or the cooler shade of the narrow lanes in the hilltop villages. The Alpilles can be crossed from end to end in a single day, and that same rhythm shows in the mornings: a village market before the heat sets in, then a climb to a ridge while the air still stays cool, and back down before the sun flattens the landscape. White stone, olive and cypress together make up the same picture, recognisable from one village to the next, in countryside still largely turned towards olive oil rather than tourism alone.