Gordes

Interesting facts

From 1970 until 1996 the castle housed a museum of nearly 500 original works by Victor Vasarely, inaugurated by Claude Pompidou.

Ridley Scott's 2006 film A Good Year was shot largely in Gordes and the neighbouring village of Bonnieux.

The bell tower of the Saint-Firmin church has an outside staircase that leads nowhere, a trace of a building that once stood against it.

Beneath the Palais Saint-Firmin lie rock-cut cellars with cisterns, underground stairways and old olive-oil mills, listed as a historic monument in 1998.

Water mills in the Véroncle gorge east of the village ground grain for four centuries, from the first built in 1506 until 1910.

An earthquake on 14 November 1887 shook the bell tower and sent the Véroncle stream partly underground, cutting power to the local mills.

The old arms of the Gordes family show a golden gourd on red, a visual pun on the French word gourde and the village name.

A castle was first recorded here in 1031, and the fortified village became known in Latin as Castrum Gordone.

In the 1840s Gordes had about 3,000 inhabitants, nearly twice its population today, before rural decline emptied the hills.

Strict local rules require new buildings to be of stone with terracotta tiles, allow only stone walls rather than fences, and keep cables underground.

Why it is worth it

Gordes is built like an amphitheatre turned inside out. The village wraps around a hilltop where the Monts de Vaucluse meet the Luberon valley, its pale stone houses stepping down the slope in tiers beneath the castle, so that from the road below the whole place reads as a single sculpted mass of limestone above the Luberon valley. The commune stretches from about 111 to 635 metres in altitude, and the view works in both directions: from the lanes at the top the plain opens out towards the Luberon hills. Gordes belongs to the association of the Plus Beaux Villages de France, and in 2023 Travel + Leisure went further and called it the most beautiful village in the world.

The castle at the summit was rebuilt in the Renaissance, in 1525, and its mass still anchors the silhouette of the village. Around it the streets are narrow, steep and paved, lined with houses of the same stone, and it was this austere harmony that drew painters here in the middle of the 20th century: André Lhote, Marc Chagall and Victor Vasarely all came to Gordes in the 1940s and 1950s. The village also paid a price in the war. In August 1944, in reprisal for Resistance activity, German troops destroyed more than twenty houses and killed thirteen people; Gordes was later awarded the Croix de guerre.

The land around the village is as remarkable as the village itself. About 1.5 km to the west, the Village des Bories preserves 28 dry-stone buildings — huts, barns and bread ovens made of thin limestone slabs laid without mortar, most of them dating from the land clearance that followed a royal edict of 1766. Close by, in a narrow valley, lies Sénanque Abbey, founded by Cistercian monks in 1148 and still home to a small community; the monks grow lavender in front of the abbey, and the purple rows before its plain stone church make one of the most familiar pictures of Provence.

Getting there

Gordes lies about 12 km from L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue and in the heart of the Luberon regional landscape of the Vaucluse. The nearest airport is Avignon Provence Airport (AVN, Caumont), about 24 km away. The Village des Bories lies about 1.5 km west of the village, and Sénanque Abbey is close by.

Gordes

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia