Fontaine de Vaucluse

At the head of a closed valley in the Vaucluse hills, a sheer limestone wall about 230 metres high rises above a round, dark pool. That pool is the mouth of the largest spring in France and the birthplace of the river Sorgue. Nothing flows in from above: all the water arrives from below, gathered underground from roughly 1,200 square kilometres of karst that stretches back to Mont Ventoux, the Vaucluse plateau and the Montagne de Lure. On average some 22 cubic metres a second leave the chasm, and after the snow melts on the high ground the outflow can climb to around 110.

The spring's real fascination is how little of it can be seen. The shaft drops almost vertically beneath the cliff, and for most of the twentieth century it was a test for divers. In 1946 Jacques Cousteau and a companion nearly died here when their breathing gas was contaminated with carbon monoxide. In 1983 the German diver Jochen Hasenmayer reached a depth of about 205 metres, and remote-controlled probes followed: one passed 245 metres the same year, and in 1985 the robot Modexa touched bottom beyond 300 metres. The chasm is deeper than the cliff above it is tall.

The valley that the Latin writers called Vallis Clausa, the closed valley, gave the whole département its name. Petrarch lived here in the fourteenth century, writing among the rocks and the green water, and left in 1353; a small museum now stands on the site of his house. Above the village cling the ruins of a castle of the bishops of Cavaillon, and downstream the Sorgue still turns the wheel of a working paper mill named after the old valley. Come in different seasons if you can: the same basin that lies still and glassy one month can be a white, roaring overflow the next.

Getting there

The spring sits just above the village of Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. The nearest town is L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, about 7 km away down the valley of the Sorgue. The closest airport is Avignon–Provence (AVN), roughly 19 km to the west.