Montagne Sainte-Victoire

Few mountains have been looked at as hard as this one. Montagne Sainte-Victoire is a limestone ridge some 18 km long rising east of Aix-en-Provence, and its south face drops in a pale wall of cliffs between 500 and 700 metres high that, in the Provençal sun, reads from the plain like a great white rampart. The highest point, the Pic des Mouches, reaches 1,011 metres near the eastern end, but the summit everyone knows is the western spur crowned since 1875 by the 19-metre Croix de Provence, visible from Aix itself.

The mountain belongs to the painter Paul Cézanne as much as to geography. In 1878 he wrote to Émile Zola praising the view of it from the train crossing the Arc valley as a "beautiful motif", and around then he began the long series in which the ridge of his native Aix appears again and again: 87 works in all, seen from the Arc valley with its railway viaduct, from the Bibémus quarry and from the hill of Les Lauves above the town, the mountain increasingly broken down into planes and patches of colour. Others followed: the mountain appears in Enguerrand Quarton's Coronation of the Virgin of 1454, André Masson painted it, and Pablo Picasso bought the Château de Vauvenargues at its northern foot in 1958; he and his wife Jacqueline are buried in its grounds. Peter Handke wrote The Lesson of Sainte-Victoire in 1980.

Its name carries a long memory. A 16th-century writer linked it to the Latin rupes victoriae, the "rock of victory", after the victory of the Roman general Gaius Marius over the Teutons and Cimbri in 102 BC; in the Middle Ages it was known as Sainte-Venture, and a chapel on the ridge is recorded in 1251. Beneath the cross stands a 17th-century priory. The limestone itself goes back to the Jurassic, folded during the uplift of the Pyrenees and Provence and later reshaped by Alpine movements, and the foothills hold dinosaur egg sites of world renown, such as Roques-Hautes near Beaurecueil, protected as a nature reserve since 1994. A fire in 1989 burned more than 50 square kilometres of the southern slopes. The massif has been protected as a classified site since 1983 and carries the Grand Site de France label.

Getting there

Sainte-Victoire rises a few kilometres east of Aix-en-Provence; the D10 and the D17, the "Route Cézanne", are the main roads along the massif. Gardanne lies about 17 km away. The nearest airport is Marseille Provence (MRS), about 37 km away.