History of the Luberon
The Luberon is rich in visible history. A major Roman road from the Italian peninsula to Spain ran along the north side of the Luberon, passing through the Roman town of Apt (Colonia Apta Julia) and crossing the Calavon on the Pont Julien, which still spans the river today, in spite of the floods of two millennia. If you're driving from Bonnieux to Roussillon and not looking for this beautiful three-arched bridge, you can ride right over it without noticing. There is an elaborately ornamented Roman arch in Cavaillon, as well as a museum with important Gallo Roman artifacts. In Apt you can sit on a low Roman wall in a sunny square and eat your pizza from a nearby pizza truck on market day; and in a small, funky museum in Cucuron you can see bits of sculpture and a remarkable incised fresco recovered from the remains of a Roman villa discovered by a local farmer as he plowed his fields in 1983.
The most prominent features of the Luberon's visible history are the Medieval hilltowns, or Villes Perchees. Gordes, Roussillon, Bonnieux, and Menerbes are the most famous ones, but there are many others, each with its own particular story and charm. Begun in the Dark Ages, when people's best protection from repeated raids was to locate their dwellings in defensible and inaccessible places, and built of the stone on which they perch, they have evolved through the centuries as a form of collective sculpture. Their Medieval ground plans, Romanesque churches, ornamented fountains, communal wash houses, old roses, and newly planted window boxes combine to evoke a profound sense of historical continuity and depth of time.
Three haunting sets of ruins in the Luberon evoke one of the darkest periods in the history of Provence: the 16th century Wars of Religion between the Protestants and the Catholics. In 1540 Merindol, on the south slope of the Petit Luberon, was razed and its Protestant inhabitants killed or enslaved by the order of the Catholic Baron Maynier of Oppede, a powerful member of the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence. Unlike Lourmarin, which was also razed during the Baron's campaign, Merindol was not rebuilt on its original site; so today you can stand amid its ruins, gazing out across the stony highlands of the Luberon and the fertile valley of the Durance, and contemplate the inhumanity of humans.
Just on the other side of the Petit Luberon, only a few kilometers away by foot trail, is the ruined castle of Baron Maynier at Oppede le Vieux. The women of Merindol used to walk over the mountain on the anniversary of the massacre to urinate at the gates of the Baron's castle. Today it is a spectacular ruin of crumbling walls and impossible arches clinging to the edge of a sheer precipice.
Most impressive of all are the ruins at the Fort de Buoux, a Protestant stronghold near the headwaters of the Aigue Brun that survived the Wars of Religion only to be taken and pulled down by Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century. The Fort de Buoux is one of the most defensible and inaccessible town sites in all of Provence. An island of stone in a deep limestone canyon, it has almost vertical sides all around. Extensive ruins of a fortress, church, and village bring home the reality that a whole community lived out their lives in fear and readiness. There are a few acres of arable land, a spring, cylindrical granaries carved into the hard limestone, and a remarkable hidden stairway notched out of the sheer mountainside and shielded from view at its base by a twenty-foot tall curtain wall of stone.
The eighteenth and nineteeth centuries have also left their marks on the villages, towns and landscape. The fountains and communal washhouses date from this period, along with some gracious townhouses, imposing civic buildings (Mairies and Hotels de Ville), and the stately plane trees that have become so much a defining characteristic of Provencal villages and roadways. Lavender fields, another symbol of Provence, are rather late arrivals to the landscape; indeed, large scale commercial production did not begin until the 1920’s.
An eloquent testament to the changing landscape are the stone terraces that march up the sides of the Luberon and are still just visible in places through the tangle of pines, scrub oaks, and hardy shrubs (rosemary, thyme, rock rose, honeysuckle, broom) that have recolonized them. At some point when flat land was scarce, or at least not available to hungry peasants, these terraces were painstakingly built and planted. Now they are mute reminders of determined people and hard lives.
As Lawrence Wylie documents in his brilliant study of Roussillon in the 1950’s, Village in the Vaucluse, life in the Luberon remained insular, traditional, and subsistence oriented even after the Second World War. But post-war irrigation projects, a real estate boom fueled by northerners in search of sunny second homes and vacation rentals, and tourism have made the Luberon of today both prosperous and cosmopolitan. The generation of men who joined the Resistance (le Maquis) during the war and used their country skills and savvy to survive in the caves and canyons of the Luberon lived to watch the Mercedes and BMW's roll into town on summer mornings and to profit from this latest invasion.
