Forcalquier

I found Forcalquier by accident, or rather by the kind of accident that happens when you leave the N100 and follow a smaller road into the Luberon’s northern hinterland without a clear destination. The town appeared on a ridge — not dramatic like Gordes, not polished like Aix, just substantial, stone-built, clearly a place that had been a regional centre for a long time and had no particular interest in performing that fact for visitors. The Monday market was in full operation in the place du Bourguet when I arrived, the stalls arranged under the plane trees in a circle that somehow included everything a functioning market needs: vegetables, cheese, honey, lavender products, secondhand books, a man selling nothing but rope in various thicknesses, and a stall offering olives in quantities that suggested the vendor had serious concerns about the future oil supply.

The lavender country really begins here. Driving north from Forcalquier toward the Plateau de Valensole, the fields stretch in rows so long and parallel that they impose a kind of geometry on the landscape that doesn’t exist anywhere else — the purple so saturated in late June it reads almost as ultraviolet in strong light. But what makes Forcalquier interesting rather than merely a gateway is the town itself: the citadel above, from which the Counts of Forcalquier once ruled a territory large enough to negotiate as an independent power, gives views in every direction across the Haute-Provence hills, with the long line of the Montagne de Lure to the northeast and the distant Luberon ridge to the south. The light up there in the late afternoon is the colour of weak tea and tastes, if you open your mouth, of thyme and dry stone.

Distilleries et Domaines de Provence, the producer responsible for Pastis Henri Bardouin and a range of vermouths and herbal liqueurs, has its distillery just outside town and offers tastings that function less like a sales pitch and more like an education in Haute-Provence botany. The pastis here is made from forty-two plants, which you learn to believe after the second or third sip, when the flavors arrive in sequence rather than all at once. I bought a bottle of their vermouth and drank a glass of it in the late afternoon on the terrace of a bar near the market square, watching pigeons negotiate the cathedral steps with a kind of municipal confidence.

The Observatoire de Haute-Provence, eleven kilometres south of Forcalquier, is one of France’s major astronomical research stations, occupying a plateau above the scrubland specifically because the air here is among the driest and least polluted in Western Europe. They open the telescopes to the public on selected evenings — I went once in early September, when the Milky Way overhead was clear enough to cast a faint shadow, and stood in a field with a group of retired teachers from Marseille who were all weeping a little. The sky looked like someone had scattered salt on black velvet and then added too much salt. It was overwhelming in the best way.

When to go: Late June for the lavender fields at their peak and the Monday market in full summer abundance. July is excellent but busier. September is my preference — the lavender has been cut but the quality of the light over the plateau in early autumn is extraordinary, and the observatory evenings are at their most spectacular with the summer Milky Way still visible.