The Ultimate Road Trip Through the Beautiful Luberon Region in France: Discover 10 Secret Spots Off the Tourist Track

Everyone has heard of Gordes; that postcard shot of it tumbling down a limestone ridge has been used to sell so many Provence travel packages. Roussillon, Ménerbes, and Lourmarin are on every itinerary, and in July and August, they’re packed with tour buses and queues for tables.

But the Luberon is vast, stretching 75 kilometers from Cavaillon in the west to Forcalquier in the east, and tucked into its hills and valleys are villages, ruins, and landscapes that so many tourists simply drive straight past. 

Of course, everyone wants to go to the tourist spots and stand in the spot they’ve seen countless times on Instagram. But if you go beyond that, you’ll find a whole other world waiting for you, full of history, stories, and gorgeous old medieval buildings, just waiting to be discovered.

10 Secret Spots in the Luberon Region 

Join me as we step back in time to some undiscovered gems in this beautiful region of France, where you won’t be fighting the tourist crowds.

1. Saignon

Saignon sits above the market town of Apt like a lookout post, which is exactly what it was. Its name comes from the Latin “signum,” meaning sign, because for centuries the village served as an alarm system for the valley below. When danger was spotted riding along the plain toward Apt, the church bells rang.

That role made Saignon valuable enough that three different lords built three separate castles within its walls at the same time. Walk around this tiny village today, and the architecture tells you how wealthy it once was: fountains, vaulted passageways, and stone mansions that have survived intact for eight centuries.

The rock that dominates the village, the Rocher de Bellevue, rises 35 meters and was a sacred site long before any of those castles existed. Pre-Roman altars dedicated to Bacchus and Mercury have been found on the site, and local legend says Charlemagne’s troops assembled here before marching into Italy. 

The 12th-century Romanesque church at the bottom of the village is unusually large for a settlement this size, and was notably built outside the village walls, which was very unusual for those times.

What to do in Saignon:

• Climb the Rocher de Bellevue for 360-degree views stretching to Mont Ventoux and the Rhone valley, but skip it if you have vertigo; there are no guardrails
• Walk the medieval streets to find the three fountain-washhouses still fed by natural springs
• Time your visit for late afternoon, then take the road south toward Sivergues for one of the best golden-hour views in the Luberon

2. Goult

Goult sits between Gordes and Apt. It has a boulangerie, a fromagerie, a butcher, a hairdresser, a Thursday market, and four restaurants, everything a real Provençal village should have.

At the top of the hill sits the Moulin de Jérusalem, a windmill built around 1750 that operated until 1919. The name comes from the district in which it stands, which was historically home to crusaders returning from the Holy Land.

After the mill stopped grinding grain, it had a brief second life as an astronomy teaching center for the National Geographic Institute before the commune took it over in the 1990s.

The old cemetery, reached via a passage near the bakery, is planted with clipped yew trees so precisely topiaried they would not look out of place in an illustration for Alice in Wonderland. And the Conservatoire des Terrasses de Cultures below the village preserves five hectares of ancient farming terraces, stone-walled, scattered with small bories, and threaded with paths that show how this hillside was farmed before the 18th century.

What to do in Goult:

• Walk up through the old village to the Moulin de Jérusalem for panoramic views across to Bonnieux
• Don’t miss the cemetery’s extraordinary topiary yews, tucked behind the boulangerie
• Time a Thursday morning visit for the village market

3. Buoux and Fort de Buoux

Buoux barely qualifies as a village. It would be better described as a handful of farmhouses, lavender, honey, goat cheese, and one of the most extraordinary historical sites in the Luberon rising above it.

At the foot of the valley, a cave under a cliff overhang shows evidence of human habitation stretching back 60,000 years. Neanderthals sheltered here. Stone sarcophagi carved directly into the rock date to the 9th century.

And above it all, carved into and built onto a narrow rock spur, sit the ruins of Fort de Buoux. This fortress was occupied more or less continuously from the Iron Age until 1660, when Louis XIV ordered it demolished to stop it becoming a Protestant stronghold.

Inside the ruins, 19 grain silos have been cut directly into the rock. There is a 60-step Bronze Age staircase leading to a stone bowl that archaeologists believe was used for ritual sacrifice. The church has architectural layers from pre-Roman, Roman, and 13th-century periods, all visible in the same walls.

A caretaker couple lives on site year-round and collects a small entry fee. Most visitors say it is one of the most memorable places they visit in all of Provence.

The Aiguebrun valley below is a rock-climbing destination of global reputation, which means the trails are well-marked even if the ruins themselves see relatively few tourists.

What to do in Buoux:

• Allow at least two hours for the climb to Fort de Buoux and a proper wander through the ruins
• Look for the hidden staircase carved into the cliff face, which served as an escape route from the fort
• Stop at Auberge de Séguins in the valley below for an excellent lunch or planche

4. Rustrel and the Colorado Provençal

Everyone goes to Roussillon for ochre, but far fewer make it 20 kilometers east to Rustrel, which has its own ochre site covering 100 hectares and sees a fraction of the visitors.

The Colorado Provençal was an active industrial quarry from 1871 until 1991, when the last miner retired. At peak production in 1929, Rustrel accounted for a significant portion of the 40,000 tons of ochre pigment produced annually in the Luberon, used to color textiles, paints, and the facades of Provençal homes. 

The site has 25 different shades running from ivory through orange to deep crimson and violet, shaped into canyon walls, fairy chimneys, and natural pyramids by a combination of mining and a century of erosion.

Unlike Roussillon’s structured Sentier des Ocres, the Colorado Provençal is explored on open hiking loops, which gives it a wilder feel. The village of Rustrel itself is a working community rather than a tourist hub, with a bakery, a post office, an old olive oil mill open to visitors, and AOC Ventoux vineyards on the hillsides above.

Bizarrely, in 1966, 18 atomic missiles were installed on the nearby Plateau d’Albion, part of France’s nuclear deterrent. The silos operated from 1972 to 1996, and the tunnels beneath the plateau remain.

What to do in Rustrel:

• Walk the Colorado Provençal in the late afternoon when the light turns the ochre cliffs deep red and the trails are nearly empty
• Visit the old olive oil mill in the village, preserved as it was at the turn of the 20th century
• Combine with a drive up to the Plateau d’Albion for the views and to see the now-decommissioned missile installation markers

5. Cucuron

Cucuron is built around a water basin, the Bassin de l’Etang, that has existed since 1403. It is 61 meters long, lined with plane trees planted in 1813, and originally built to supply a flour mill. After the mills closed in the 19th century, it became a place for leisure, and it is now the heart of village life, with restaurants and cafés shading its edges. 

If it looks faintly familiar, that is because Ridley Scott filmed scenes from the 2006 Russell Crowe film “A Good Year” here, and the 1995 French film “The Horseman on the Roof” used Cucuron’s rooftops.

Each spring, the village celebrates Saint Tulle Day. A poplar tree is carried on the backs of men through the village streets and erected in front of the church, commemorating the saint credited with ending a medieval plague. The village suffered a real one in 1720, when the epidemic that spread from Marseille reached this far inland.

The 13th-century Church of Saint-Martin houses a carved wooden retable and a 17th-century organ that is still used for summer concerts.

What to do in Cucuron:

• Walk to the dungeon tower at the western end of the village for the rooftop view that featured in “The Horseman on the Roof”
• Eat or have a drink beside the Bassin de l’Etang, especially at dusk when the plane trees go golden
• Visit the Church of Saint-Martin to see the 17th-century organ and the carved retable

6. Ansouis

Ansouis is officially one of France’s Most Beautiful Villages, and sits in the quieter southern Luberon. The Château d’Ansouis, a fortress that dates to the 10th century, is still lived in by the Sabran-Pontévès family. It is one of the only privately occupied castles in the Luberon that opens for guided tours, but the visits are in French, no photos are permitted inside, and the guide is often the owner. 

The château is actually two castles in one, a later Renaissance structure built around its own medieval predecessor, and the furnished rooms and terraced gardens overlooking the Durance valley are intact rather than museumified.

Elsewhere in the village, the Musée Extraordinaire was created by local artist and deep-sea diver Georges Mazoyer, who restored a 16th-century building to display his paintings alongside artifacts he recovered from the seabed. 

Peter Mayle was a regular visitor to Ansouis when he lived nearby, and the village’s Bar des Sports on the cobbled square is the kind of café that people sit in and immediately start calculating whether they could move here.

What to do in Ansouis:

• Reserve a guided tour of the Château d’Ansouis in advance
• Visit the Musée Extraordinaire for Mazoyer’s paintings and his collection of deep-sea artifacts
• Stop for a drink at the Bar des Sports on the Place de la Vielle Fontaine

7. Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt

Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt, or Saint-Sat as locals call it, has three doorways on the central Rue de la République, each individually listed as a historic monument, which is remarkable for a street that takes about two minutes to walk. Above the village, the ruins of a medieval castle offer sweeping views across the Calavon valley and a man-made lake below, and beside them sits the 11th-century chapel of Castel’s Castral.

That chapel became significant in 1850 when a young girl named Rosette Tamisier reported a Marian apparition there. The event drew pilgrims from across the region and sparked a religious revival that some historians credit with setting the conditions for the far more famous Lourdes miracle eight years later in 1858.

The Plateau de Claparèdes above the village is one of the better spots in the Luberon for seeing lavender fields in July, alongside the dry-stone borie huts scattered across the landscape.

What to do in Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt:

• Climb to the castle ruins above the village for the valley views and a look at the Castel’s Castral chapel
• Walk the Plateau de Claparèdes for lavender fields and bories without the crowds of better-known routes
• Wander Rue de la République and see if you can spot all three individually listed doorways

8. Oppedette and the Gorges d’Oppedette

The village of Oppedette has around 60 inhabitants and sits at the end of a series of small roads that feel increasingly remote. It takes its name from the Celto-Ligurian oppidum built on this rocky spur in antiquity, and the site has been inhabited, more or less continuously, for roughly 40,000 years. But it’s the gorges that are the big drawcard.

The Gorges d’Oppedette were carved by the Calavon River through the limestone plateau, and they run for 2.5 kilometers, reaching up to 140 meters wide and 200 meters deep in places. The walls shift colors as you move through them, and the light changes, white limestone giving way to grey and green where the vegetation finds purchase. 

During the Wars of Religion in the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestant communities from the surrounding villages used the floor of the gorge as a place of secret worship, hidden from Catholic authorities by the depth of the canyon walls.

The hiking loop from the village takes around three hours and includes sections along the cliff edge. In summer, the Calavon is often dry, which allows you to walk sections of the gorge floor itself through passages barely wide enough for one person.

What to do in Oppedette:

• Walk the 7km circuit from the Belvédère car park for the full gorge experience, allowing three hours
• In summer, descend to the dry gorge floor and walk through the narrow canyon passages, some of which are barely shoulder-width
• Combine with a visit to nearby Rustrel, around 12 kilometers east, for a full day of extraordinary Luberon landscapes

9. Oppède-le-Vieux

There are two Oppèdes. The modern one sits in the valley, with supermarkets and swimming pools. Oppède-le-Vieux, the original, clings to the north face of the Luberon above it, semi-abandoned and heavy with history.

The village was built on a rocky outcrop because the region had spent centuries being fought over, and height was survival. Its worst chapter came in 1545 when Jean Maynier, Baron of Oppède and First President of the Parliament of Aix-en-Provence, used the castle here as his base for a campaign against the Protestant Vaudois communities of the Luberon. The operation destroyed 11 villages, killed thousands, and drove survivors into slavery or exile. The massacre of Mérindol alone claimed 3,000 lives.

By the 17th century, with peace finally restored, the villagers found it impractical to farm their valley fields from a steep hilltop and began moving down. The last official act in the old village was the relocation of the city hall in 1909. 

Then, in 1940, around 50 artists, architects, and writers, including Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, wife of the author of The Little Prince, formed a commune in the ruins to hide from the Nazi occupation. They became known as the Groupe d’Oppède and spent the war years restoring what they could.

The castle walls contain an unsolved puzzle: a palindromic Latin inscription called a Sator Square, reading SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS in every direction, whose meaning and origin remain disputed by historians.

What to do in Oppède-le-Vieux:

• Walk up to the collegiate church of Notre-Dame-d’Alydon and the castle ruins above for views across the Coulon valley to the Vaucluse plateau
• Look for the Sator Square carved into the castle fortifications
• Visit in spring or autumn when the overgrowth is at its most atmospheric, and crowds are minimal

10. Lacoste

Lacoste is more well-known than the other entries on this list, mostly because of its most infamous former resident. The Marquis de Sade, the 18th-century writer whose name gave us the word sadism, inherited the 11th-century castle above the village and used it as a refuge between the scandals that made Paris too uncomfortable. 

He spent lavishly on it, building a 120-seat private theater inside the walls, a labyrinth of clipped evergreens in the grounds modeled on the floor pattern of Chartres Cathedral, and hosting the kind of parties that eventually resulted in his imprisonment. During the Revolution, villagers stripped the castle for building stone and sold what was left. Much of the lower village is still built from the Marquis’s former walls.

The castle was bought by fashion designer Pierre Cardin in 2001, who turned it into a cultural center and launched an annual opera and theater festival in the old quarries below the castle, a natural amphitheater with extraordinary acoustics. When Cardin died in 2020, he bequeathed the estate to the Institut de France.

The Savannah College of Art and Design has had a campus in Lacoste since the 1970s, which is why you will occasionally encounter American art students in the narrow medieval streets alongside the handful of permanent residents. The village has 400 inhabitants and two medieval gateway arches, and the views from the castle ruins across the Calavon valley to Bonnieux are among the best in the Luberon.

What to do in Lacoste:

• Walk up to the castle ruins for the panoramic views across the valley, open June to September
• Check the Festival de Lacoste schedule if visiting in July, performances take place in the natural quarry below the castle
• Explore the village on foot through the two medieval gateway arches and look for the boulangerie and the SCAD student galleries scattered through restored old buildings