During his presidency half a century ago, François Mitterrand had a discreet village hideaway built in Provence’s Luberon Valley, where he would spend holidays holed up with his secret second family.
, crediting the town’s celebrity to narrow passageways, white stone houses, a chateau, and a church that are “emblematic of a typical Provençal village.”Rather than igniting my curiosity, the myriad superlatives had me feeling slightly skeptical during the drive from Avignon to Gordes a few weeks ago. The “world’s most beautiful village,” is a lot to live up to, and I’m always a bit wary of destinations with loads of hype attached to them.
The walls are adorned with stern-faced 18th-century oil portraits whose eyes seemed to follow me sometimes, and plush animal heads are mounted trophy-like along the corridor leading to the kids club as though a trigger-happy hunter had gone on a safari at FAO Schwarz.
When I walked in, a 60-something woman behind the bar was shouting at an older gentleman to “shut your mouth” in a tone that suggested that this kind of banter between the proprietors and local patrons was fairly commonplace.
On the other side of the street stood a clinic offering kinesiology, energy treatments, and something calledthat I think has something to do with healing crystals. The California vibe continued as I made my way through the tangle of slippery, cobbled streets past an organic wine shop and a juice bar. Wellness is big in Provence, and Gordes is no exception.
“Whether at Senanque Abbey or in the most humble dwelling in Gordes, a small square window in a large wall lets in so much light…” Vasarely recalled in 1964. “This same opening, viewed from the outside, becomes an ethereal and unfathomable black cube. The villages and towns of the South, blasted by an implacable sun, were my introduction to the contradictions of perspective.”
“There have always been a lot of people,” Pierre-François Lamiraud, a Paris-based singer and actor in his 30s, who has been visiting the village for the past decade, told me. “But every year there’s more.”
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