Isle-sur-la-Sorgue

The Sorgue river splits into several channels as it runs through this town, fast and startlingly clear, coming straight off an underground spring a few kilometres upstream that’s one of the most powerful in Europe. It gives the whole place a soundtrack — water running under bridges, over old mill sills, past cafés built right to the edge of the current — that we found ourselves listening for even after we’d left.

Waterwheels that used to power an industry

Nine wooden waterwheels still turn along the town’s channels, moss-slick and creaking, relics of a silk and wool industry that once ran dozens of mills here. Most no longer do anything but turn — a few have been fitted with small generators — but watching them work in the clear water, with fish visible in the current beneath them, gives you a sense of how the town’s whole layout, all the little footbridges and mill leats, was built around water doing actual labour rather than just looking pretty.

Sunday, and every antique dealer in Provence

On Sundays the town becomes one of the largest antiques and brocante markets in France, hundreds of dealers setting up along the riverbanks selling everything from serious eighteenth-century furniture to boxes of mismatched cutlery. We went planning to browse and came home with a set of café chairs, a stack of linen napkins with someone else’s monogram on them, and a genuinely unnecessary argument about a second armoire that Lia still brings up when she wants to win a different fight entirely.

When to go: Sunday morning, obviously, and early — the good stalls thin out fast and the parking gets genuinely difficult by ten. Come on any other day of the week and you get a much quieter, gentler version of the same town.