Provence

Provence's lavender is in flower in exactly the months a visitor would do better to avoid. It comes out in the lower Luberon in the last week of June, is in full colour across the Luberon and the Valensole Plateau through July, and hangs on around Sault into early August: the weeks when the Riviera's crowds come inland, the hill villages and the Gorges du Verdon fill up, and many small restaurants and shops close for their owners' own holiday. May and June suit everything else better, and so does September into October. For anyone set on the purple, the last week of June in the lower Luberon is where the two calendars meet.

The region runs from Avignon on the Rhône to the Gorges du Verdon, and the ground changes all the way. Avignon and the Vaucluse, the papal city and the plain around it, is where most visitors come in. The Luberon is the one for hill villages, in golden stone on a ridge of vineyards and lavender, Gordes and Lourmarin among them. The Alpilles is a small limestone range of olive groves between Arles and Saint-Rémy, with Les Baux on a cliff top. Aix-en-Provence and the Pays d'Aix puts a university town in reach of the wine estates. The Camargue, the Rhône's flat delta of marsh, rice paddies and salt flats, belongs to the bulls and the flamingos. Haute-Provence and the Gorges du Verdon, the mountainous interior, is the far end of the region from Avignon, and a place to sleep near the canyon rather than drive back from it.

Aix's market spreads on and around the Cours Mirabeau on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, from about half past eight until one, and Cézanne's old studio is out on the Chemin de la Marguerite at the edge of town. Away from Aix, most days are drives. The Luberon goes in a loop, each village a short way from the next: the belvedere above Gordes for the view across the valley, then the path through Roussillon's red ochre cliffs. Saint-Rémy has the Roman ruins of Glanum on its southern edge, and on the same side of town the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, where Van Gogh painted while he was committed.

Marseille Provence is the main airport, though Avignon is nearer by road for the Vaucluse and the northern Luberon, and Nîmes for the Camargue. At Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, up near the Verdon, the chapel of Notre-Dame de Beauvoir is 262 steps up the cliff above the village, and over it a golden star hangs on a chain strung between the rocks. Moustiers has a good many legends about how it got there, and keeps all of them.