Ocres de Roussillon

Interesting facts

The raw ore is 80 to 90 percent very fine sand, and the old washing method recovered about 200 kilograms of pigment per cubic metre.

Ochre was washed with water pumped from local streams into settling basins of around 200 cubic metres, then left until May to firm up before drying in the open air.

Heating yellow ochre turns its iron oxide into red haematite, and the firing temperature and time decide the final shade from pale yellow to dark brown.

Beyond paint, Vaucluse ochre became an important ingredient in the early rubber industry.

By the 19th century more than a hundred quarries and twenty-five processing works operated in the Apt district.

Astier's neighbours petitioned against him, complaining that his washing sand blocked the street and his dust invaded their houses and cisterns.

The industry lost major markets after the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, and today the last working ochre quarry in the area is at Gargas.

Formations along the path carry names such as the Fairies' Needles and the Giants' Causeway, shaped by mining and by rain.

Samuel Beckett mentioned Roussillon in Waiting for Godot, drawing on the years he spent hiding there from 1942 to 1945.

Under the name Peyrane, the village was the subject of the American scholar Laurence Wylie's 1957 study Village in the Vaucluse.

Why it is worth it

Just outside the hilltop village of Roussillon in Provence, the ground turns every shade from pale yellow through orange to deep red. The Sentier des Ocres, a marked path laid through former ochre quarries, winds among cliffs, gullies and slender pinnacles shaped partly by miners and partly by rain, with holm oak, downy oak, pine and juniper growing against the coloured sand. The colours come from iron: the deposits are fine sand mixed with clay, tinted by iron minerals, goethite for the yellows and haematite for the reds.

These ochre sands spread across a whole district around Apt, from Roussillon to Gargas, Villars, Rustrel and Gignac, and they made the area the heart of a French pigment industry. Its founder is usually named as Jean-Étienne Astier, a Roussillon man who in the 1780s experimented with washing the coloured sand to separate out pure pigment, and who by 1810 was running two works near the village. Through the 19th century quarrying and washing spread across the district, silting up streams and covering the village in dust, and by 1930 the region was selling around 40,000 tonnes of ochre a year. The Depression, the Second World War and the rise of synthetic colours brought decline. Extraction at Roussillon has long since ended, and taking ochre from the site is forbidden to protect it from erosion.

The village itself, whose walls share the warm tones of the hill, is one of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France and lies within the Luberon regional natural park. Samuel Beckett spent much of the Second World War here, hiding from the Nazis, and wrote his novel Watt in the village. The former Mathieu ochre works, founded in 1870, has been turned into a conservatory of ochres and pigments.

Getting there

Roussillon lies about 8 km west of Apt and roughly 20 km east of L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. The nearest railway station is at Cavaillon, about 22 km away, and Avignon TGV is the nearest high-speed station. The nearest airport is Avignon–Provence (AVN), about 32 km away.

Ocres de Roussillon

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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