Gordes: A Village Made of Stone and Light (#769)
Updated: 3 days ago
There are places you visit because someone tells you there is something there you should see.
And then there are places where the place itself is the thing to see.
Gordes is one of those places.
You see it before you arrive.
The road winds through the countryside of Provence, through vineyards, olive trees and fields bleached by the summer sun.
Then, almost without warning, there it is - an entire village clinging to the side of a rocky hill.
Stone houses rise one above another.
At the top sits the château.
Beyond it stretches the enormous landscape of the Luberon.
For a moment, you simply stop and look.
Gordes seems less constructed than accumulated.
One house upon another.
One wall upon another.
One century upon another.
The village sits about 340 meters above sea level on a rocky promontory of the Monts de Vaucluse, overlooking the Calavon Valley and facing the Luberon.
Its position was not chosen for the magnificent view.
It was chosen because height once meant safety.
Gordes developed around its castle from the eleventh century onward, becoming a fortified medieval settlement.
Today, of course, we arrive for very different reasons.
We come for beauty.
And Gordes has plenty of it.
Walking Up Is Easy
The best way to experience Gordes is to walk.
This sounds obvious until you begin walking.
Gordes has a distinct preference for the vertical.
Its calades - the old stone-paved streets of Provence - descend between tightly packed houses, disappear beneath arches, open unexpectedly onto tiny squares and then plunge downhill again.
But perhaps that is part of Gordes.
It forces you to slow down.
You begin noticing things you might otherwise pass: an ancient wooden door, a shutter faded by decades of sunlight, a cat stretched across a stone step, a small restaurant squeezed into a space that seems far too small to contain a restaurant.
There are galleries. Cafés. Shops. Tables beneath umbrellas.
People carrying cameras. People carrying shopping bags.
People carrying ice creams that are beginning to lose their battle with the Provençal sun.
And everywhere there is stone.
Walls of stone.
Houses of stone.
Steps of stone.
The château itself is a mixture of medieval fortress and Renaissance architecture, its present form owing much to alterations made in the sixteenth century.
Stone should make a place feel cold.
In Gordes, somehow, it does the opposite.
Perhaps it is the light.
Provence Understands Light
Artists have understood something about Provence for a very long time.
The light is different here.
It catches the pale limestone walls and turns them cream, gold and sometimes almost white.
Shadows become sharply defined.
A doorway becomes a composition.
A row of shutters becomes a study in geometry.
Gordes experienced difficult times during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Population declined as agriculture and traditional industries struggled, and war, disease, earthquakes and economic change took their toll.
Then, beginning around the 1950s, artists were drawn to the village - attracted by its isolation, ruins, landscape and, inevitably, its light.
It is easy to understand why.
You could stand in almost any street with a sketchbook, a camera or a paintbrush and find something worth recording.
But the danger is spending so much time trying to capture Gordes that you forget to look at it.
Sometimes the camera needs to come down.
Beyond the Postcard
Gordes is now officially recognized as one of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France - one of the Most Beautiful Villages of France.
And there is a problem with being beautiful.
People come to see you.
Lots of people.
The cafés fill.
Cars search for parking spaces.
Tour groups gather.
Cameras appear.
The village that once occupied its hilltop for protection now occupies countless postcards, calendars and Instagram photographs.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as tourism overwhelming authenticity.
But that seems too simple.
The tourists are there because Gordes really is extraordinary.
And beneath the restaurants, boutiques and galleries, the old village remains.
There are still those narrow streets designed partly to provide shelter from the Mistral.
There are still houses built into the hillside.
The View from the Edge
Eventually you find yourself at one of Gordes' viewpoints.
Below are vineyards, fields, farmhouses and roads winding across the valley.
In the distance is the Luberon.
And suddenly the village makes sense.
For centuries, generations of people stood here and looked across this same landscape.
They were not tourists.
They were farmers, craftsmen, merchants, mothers, children, soldiers and shopkeepers.
Gordes once supported silk spinning, tanning, shoemaking and wool weaving alongside agriculture.
Life here could be difficult, and the beautiful stone houses we admire today were not built as holiday scenery.
They were homes and workplaces.
That is something travel occasionally allows us to forget.
We encounter the past esthetically.
The people who lived it encountered it practically.
We admire the stone staircase.
Someone once carried water up it.
We photograph the narrow doorway.
Someone once stood there waiting for a husband or son to return from war.
We admire the ancient wall.
Someone built it.
A Village That Makes You Stop
Perhaps that is what I liked most about Gordes.
It makes you stop.
Initially because of its beauty.
Then, if you allow it, for something deeper.
Standing on that hillside, looking across Provence, you become aware of how brief our occupation of places really is.
The château remains.
The streets remain.
The stone remains.
Generations arrive, live their lives and disappear.
And now, for a few hours, we are here.
We walk the same streets.
We sit at a café.
We look across the same valley.
We take photographs because somehow we want to hold onto the experience.
But perhaps Gordes offers a gentler lesson.
We don't need to possess beautiful places.
We only need to notice them.
To stop.
To look.
And then, eventually, to walk back down that hill.
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