The 1,000 year old village of Lourmarin also makes the grade.
Surrounded by olive groves, almond trees and vineyards, it has a typically Provençal ambience of gentility and beauty, at the foot of the Luberon Massif in Provence. It’s 37km north of Aix-en-Provence en route to Gordes. There’s a mere one thousand residents in Lourmarin, but there are an astonishing sixteen restaurants and three café-brasseries.
Albert Camus the French writer, philosopher and winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature, lived and worked amid this Provençal ambience of tranquility and loveliness until his death in 1960. He is still here, buried in the cemetery.
Now the village has another well-known writer who is alive and well and pulling in crowds, Englishman Peter Mayle.
Below: the market at nearby Aix-en-Provence.
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