Luberon

The range runs some sixty kilometres from west to east, between Cavaillon and Manosque, and the map divides it in three: the Petit Luberon to the west, the Grand Luberon to the east, and the eastern Luberon beyond the gap at Céreste. A single break crosses the chain from north to south, the combe de Lourmarin, and it carries the only road linking the two slopes without going round the massif. The high point, the Mourre Nègre, reaches one thousand one hundred and twenty-five metres — enough to hold snow a few days a year, not enough to be called a mountain. The two slopes have neither the same light nor the same economy. To the north, the villages look across the Calavon valley towards the Vaucluse plateau: Gordes sits on a spur of grey limestone, Roussillon is planted in a red ochre quarry worked until the nineteen-thirties, and the cliffs at Rustrel, further east, carry the same colours. To the south, Ménerbes, Bonnieux, Lacoste and Lourmarin open onto the Durance; the villages there are more lived in year-round, the slopes gentler, and the vine holds as much ground as the fruit tree. The mistral comes down the Rhône corridor and crosses the range through the combe, sometimes for several days running; it is what clears the sky and cools the evenings. Dry stone is everywhere, and it tells the story of the range better than a museum would. Laid without mortar, held by the fit of the blocks alone, it built the terraces that keep the soil on the slopes, the walls that mark out the plots, and the bories — corbelled huts, vaulted in stone, raised between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to shelter tools, harvests and shepherds. The Village des Bories, near Gordes, gathers some twenty of them. A short way off, Sénanque abbey, founded in 1148 by Cistercian monks, occupies a closed valley; its lavender field, photographed for decades, flowers from late June to mid-July before being cut. Lacoste keeps the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's castle, Oppède-le-Vieux a village all but abandoned in the last century and reoccupied since, and Lourmarin a Renaissance château and the grave of Albert Camus. You stay here in a mas — a stone farmhouse with thick walls, few openings to the north and a roof of round tiles — or in a bastide, taller and more ordered, built for an owner rather than for a farm. Both answer the same climate: keeping the cool in summer, holding against the wind the rest of the year. The country around lives on the vine, with the Luberon and Ventoux appellations, on olives, cherries, Cavaillon melons and, in winter, on black truffle, sold at the Apt and Carpentras markets from November to March. Apt is also the town of candied fruit, made here since the Middle Ages. The markets set the rhythm of the week: each village has its own, on a given morning — Apt on Saturday, Lourmarin on Friday, Coustellet on Sunday — and it is better to build the days around them than the other way round. Between them the roads are narrow and climb quickly, and fifty kilometres on the map easily make an hour. That is what gives the Luberon its pace: you see little of it in a day, and you come back.