Roussillon
"The soil here is so red it looks like the land is bleeding, and somehow it is the most beautiful thing in the valley."
I came to Roussillon in the afternoon, which is the wrong time — the midday light flattens the ochre to a uniform orange and the village fills with people who have driven up from the coast. But then I walked the Sentier des Ocres at four o’clock, when the light was beginning to angle, and understood immediately why this place has been drawing painters and pigment merchants for three centuries. The cliffs are not simply red. They are red and orange and burnt sienna and a yellow so deep it crosses into gold, and they change shade continuously as clouds move across the sun. The pathways cut through the old quarry where ochre was extracted and shipped across Europe, and the faces of the cliffs are so deeply colored that your shoes come away stained.
The village sits on the highest point of a ridge and can be seen from ten kilometres away, its buildings shaded in the same spectrum as the cliffs below — the municipality actually requires that renovations use the traditional ochre palette, which means the whole settlement functions as a kind of living colour chart. Walking the lanes, you pass through amber into a deeper terracotta and then into a pale cream that makes the surrounding shades seem even more intense by contrast. The church at the top of the village catches the setting sun on its tower and turns a colour that has no name in English — something between a ripe apricot and a very old brick. A black cat sat in the doorway of a house painted the exact shade of dried blood and blinked at me with total indifference.
There is a bakery on the main street that makes a focaccia-style bread flavored with rosemary and olive oil that I ate three days in a row. The woman who ran it was from the village, had been running it for thirty years, and found it genuinely puzzling that I wanted to talk about the ochre rather than the bread. The bread was excellent. There was also a small gallery run by a painter who had moved from Lyon in the nineties and sold watercolors of the cliffs in which the colours were, impossibly, more accurate than photographs.
What makes Roussillon different from the other Luberon villages is that the reason for its existence is still visible and physical. Gordes was a fortified settlement; Bonnieux was a religious centre. Roussillon was a mine. The pigment industry gave the village its economy for centuries — ochre from here ended up in the paintings of Dutch masters and the wallpapers of French châteaux — and that industrial history gives the place a particularity that mere prettiness lacks. The cliffs are both the attraction and the original purpose, and standing in them you can feel both simultaneously.
When to go: September and October, when the tourist load drops and the afternoon light becomes even more theatrical on the cliffs. The Sentier des Ocres is best walked in the morning or evening — at midday it becomes a queue. Spring wildflowers appear on the plateau in April and May and turn the green scrub around the ochre paths vivid.