Roussillon

I’d seen photos of Roussillon before we went and assumed, as you do, that they’d been color-corrected into something more dramatic than reality. They hadn’t. The village sits on top of one of the largest ochre deposits in the world, and the cliffs beneath it run through every warm colour you can name — apricot, rust, blood orange, a red so deep it looks almost purple in the shade — with the village houses painted to match by municipal decree, so the whole place reads as a single continuous cliff face that happens to have windows.

The ochre trail, and the laundry consequences

The Sentier des Ocres is a marked walking loop through the old quarry pits just below the village, and it is, without question, the messiest thing we did in Provence. The path winds between pinnacles and canyons of soft coloured sand carved by decades of mining before the industry shut down in the 1930s, and within ten minutes Lia’s white sneakers were the same shade as the cliffs. There’s a reason the ticket booth sells cheap plastic shoe covers, and a reason almost nobody buys them.

A village painted to match its own cliff

Up in the village, the ochre continues on every façade — a local rule requires new paint jobs to be approved against a chart of historic pigment shades, so a shutter repainted last year has to match a house that’s stood since the 1700s. We had lunch on a terrace overlooking the valley, a simple plate of tapenade and grilled sardines, and watched the cliffs change colour as clouds moved across the sun, the rust deepening and lightening like something breathing.

When to go: Late afternoon light is when the ochre earns its reputation, so time the trail for two or three hours before sunset. Spring and autumn keep the trail dust down to a manageable amount of ruined laundry.