Van Gogh’s Provence

If you have ever dreamed of Provence, it probably looked like Vincent Van Gogh’s wheat fields and cypress trees, stony white hills and starry nights, tumbling clouds in brilliant blue skies. These images have made this part of Provence so familiar that it has become a kind of collective fantasy. Van Gogh spent his last and most prolific years painting the fields, farmhouses (mas in Provençal) and people of this corner of Provence. He produced so many images of the area that stretches from Avignon, west to Nîmes and south to Arles (the gateway to the Camargue) that visiting it, you might feel as if you’re walking around a living art gallery.

There is, of course, much more to enjoy here besides the buzz of déjà vu. Rustic villages of great charm and individuality punctuate a varied, distinctive and lightly populated landscape. From the walled city of Avignon, above a wide and fertile reach of the Rhône Valley, the 14th- and 15th-century Papal vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape are just visible in the distance. The Pont du Gard rises out of the mists of the River Gardon. This, the world’s most complete example of a three-tiered Roman aqueduct, can still be crossed. And local history, from outstanding Greco-Roman and Medieval ruins to the caves of the French Resistance, is within easy reach of all of the region’s key destinations.

The Alpilles are a range of abrupt and jagged limestone hills forming a geological extension of the Lubéron between Avignon and Arles. Though only 1,000 to 1,500 feet high, they have bare summits and strangely eroded shapes, which create the illusion of high mountains. In fact, they are almost intimate in scale. The landscape is arid but not barren. Olive and almond trees soften the lower slopes and dry valleys of the Alpilles, while scattered oak, pine and brush weave patterns on the outcrops of pale, exposed limestone.

The Garrigues region takes its name from its stony landscape. The term garrigue, used in both France and Spain, refers to stretches of dry, pebbly soil and stone table land that cannot hold rainwater and, therefore, is able to support only rough, scrubby plants. The Garrigues of Provence are of a particularly vast extent, reaching from just north of Nîmes to the edge of the Massif Central, France’s central mountain region. Composed of gentle, rounded hills (which the French evocatively call mamelons), covered with rockrose, thistle, thorn and broom, the Garrigues are characteristically harsh and dry. But this is Provence, where even hard and austere landscapes have soft pleasures. Wild lavender, thyme and rosemary flourish here and other aromatic plants (basil, sage, marjoram and savory) are cultivated, keeping the air scented year-round. The Gorges du Gardon divides The Garrigues almost in half and marks the border between Provence and the Cévennes Region.

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