France
Les Baux-de-Provence
Ruined fortress walls dissolving into white rock as if the mountain were slowly swallowing them.
The fortress ruins dissolve into the limestone ridge beneath them, the boundary between built stone and living rock erased by centuries of wind. Les Baux-de-Provence perches on a spur of the Alpilles in southern France, the valley below a patchwork of olive groves and garrigue scented with wild thyme, and up here the wind is constant.
The castle of Les Baux, built on top of the cliffs, was among the most powerful fortresses in medieval Provence, and its dismantling on Richelieu's orders in the seventeenth century left the ruins that have been merging with the rock ever since — you walk through what remains of towers, chapels and siege engines with the whole plain spread below. The village underneath is a Plus Beaux Villages member, and the red soils around it gave the world the word bauxite, the aluminium ore first identified here in 1821. In the old limestone quarries below the ridge, the Carrières des Lumières projects changing programmes of art across walls the height of a cathedral, and the olive groves of the Vallée des Baux press an oil that is among the most prized in Provence.
Solo
The summit path along the fortress ruins, with the Alpilles dropping away to either side and the wind carrying garrigue scent, is a walk where the line between archaeology and geology disappears.
Couple
The Carrières des Lumières immerses you in projected art inside a quarry — the scale and darkness make it a shared sensory experience — and olive-oil tasting in the valley follows.
- The ruined fortress dissolves into the white rock of the Alpilles ridge — you cannot tell where castle ends and cliff begins.
- The Carrières des Lumières projects art across the walls of an old quarry — immersive exhibitions in a cathedral of stone.
- Olive groves in the valley below press some of the finest oil in Provence, with mills you can visit and taste at.
- Among the most powerful fortresses of medieval Provence, dismantled by Richelieu and left to the wind and the thyme.
Olive oil from the Moulin Castelas in the valley below — peppery, green, pressed from the groves under the castle.
Lamb shoulder slow-cooked with Alpilles thyme and rosemary at a village restaurant.
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