Gordes

Where it sits. Gordes clings to the southern rim of the Vaucluse plateau in the Luberon, about 40 kilometres east of Avignon, its houses stacked in tiers down a limestone spur above the Imergue valley. The view that sells a million photographs is taken from a lay-by on the D15 on the approach from Cavaillon, where the whole village reads as a single pale mass rising to a château and a church, with the Monts de Vaucluse behind and the Luberon ridge across the plain to the south. The building material is the ground it stands on: dry local limestone, laid without mortar in the oldest structures and rendered in pale lime elsewhere, so the village and the hillside are literally the same colour. Roughly 1,800 people live there, a number that swells several times over between June and September.

What is actually there. The château at the summit was rebuilt in 1525–1541 by Bertrand de Simiane on the base of a twelfth-century fortress, and it keeps its round corner towers, its machicolations and, inside, a monumental Renaissance chimneypiece of 1541 that is among the finest in Provence. Below it the lanes are calades — cobbled ramps with a central drainage channel, stepped where the gradient defeats wheels. Gordes was a Resistance centre in 1944 and was shelled and burned in reprisal in August of that year, then rebuilt; it holds the Croix de Guerre. Two kilometres south-west, the Village des Bories preserves about twenty dry-stone huts with corbelled roofs, restored from 1969 and open as a museum; the technique is prehistoric in origin but most surviving bories in the Luberon date from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and served as shepherds' shelters, stores and silkworm sheds. Four kilometres north, in a fold of the Sénancole, the Cistercian Abbey of Sénanque was founded in 1148 and is still occupied by monks who farm the lavender field in front of the church — the single most reproduced image of Provence in existence.

On screen. The Luberon's screen identity was made by two very different productions. Claude Berri's Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (both 1986), adapted from Marcel Pagnol, were shot largely in this region — around Vaugines, whose church and square appear repeatedly, at Mirabeau, and at the pond at Cucuron where Emmanuelle Béart's Manon bathes — rather than in the hills near Aubagne where Pagnol had set and originally filmed his own version. Twenty years later Ridley Scott made A Good Year (2006) here, with Russell Crowe as a London bond trader who inherits a run-down vineyard. The estate on screen is the real Château la Canorgue near Bonnieux, a working organic wine domaine about fifteen minutes south of Gordes; the village scenes — the square, the fountain, the café terrace, the market — were shot in Gordes and Bonnieux, and the aerial shots that open the film sweep across exactly the plateau you stand on. Scott had a personal stake in the geography: he has owned a property in the Luberon for decades, and the film is closer to a home movie about the landscape than a plot. The effect on visitor numbers was immediate and has never subsided.

What to do with a day. Park below the village and climb — there is no other way to see it. The church of Saint-Firmin sits below the château, and beneath the village runs the Caves du Palais Saint-Firmin, a set of excavated cellars, oil mills and cisterns cut into the rock over centuries, open as a visit. Sénanque limits access to guided tours and asks for silence; the lavender is usually in flower from about the third week of June to mid-July and is cut in July, so a visit in August finds bare stubble. The Friday morning market fills the Place du Château. Roussillon, with its ochre cliffs and disused pigment quarries, is 10 kilometres east; Ménerbes, Lacoste with its Sade castle, Bonnieux and Oppède-le-Vieux form a loop of an afternoon.

Getting there and timing. There is no train and effectively no useful bus; a car is required, roughly 50 minutes from Avignon TGV. Parking in the village is scarce and paid, and the approach road becomes a queue on July and August afternoons. The stone streets are steep, uneven and thoroughly hostile to wheels of any kind. Light matters here more than in most places: the west-facing façade of the village takes the late sun and turns amber for about half an hour before sunset, which is when the D15 viewpoint fills with tripods.