A Road Trip Through Provence for First Timers and How To Beat the Crowds to See the Best Spots

There is a magic about Provence that’s hard to describe until you’ve been. The weather is wonderful, yes, but it’s the light that stays with you. It sounds strange, but the light here is different and seems to bathe everything in an ethereal glow.

It’s one of the reasons artists have flocked to the area for years, and it’s impossible to capture it properly on camera. If you’ve never been, then you’ll understand once you have.

But the weather and light aren’t the only things that draw people. The villages and towns are stunning, and the history, well, there’s enough to keep even the biggest history buff happy.

But if you only have a limited amount of time, and this is your first trip, how do you know where to go on your road trip through Provence, and what are the non-negotiable stops you’ll want to add to your itinerary?

Well, these are my recommendations for first-timers in Provence. I’ve been to them all and would happily go again.

Avignon

On my first trip to Provence, I started off in Avignon as I wanted to see the Palais des Papes, a giant Gothic fortress in the middle of town that was home to 7 popes between 1309 and 1377. 

The French king Philip the Fair leaned hard on Pope Clement V, Clement moved the papacy out of Rome, and for nearly 70 years the head of the Catholic Church ran things from the banks of the Rhône. 

The building is all bare stone and empty halls because the popes stripped it of pretty much everything when they finally returned to Rome.

The famous bridge, the Pont d’Avignon, is the one from the nursery rhyme, and yes, it stops halfway across the river. The Rhône kept washing bits of it away in the 17th century, and eventually they gave up rebuilding. 

You can walk out onto what’s left for a few euros. I’d skip it unless you have kids who know the song. The view from Rocher des Doms park, just above the palace, is free and better.

Avoiding the crowds here is straightforward. Get to the Palais when it opens at 9 am, buy the combined ticket online the night before, and be back at your hotel by 11:30 when the tour groups pour off the buses from the river cruises. 

For lunch, avoid the Place de l’Horloge, which is wall-to-wall tourist food spots, and head toward Rue des Teinturiers, the old dyers’ street with the mossy water wheels. The food is better, and the check is smaller.

Pont du Gard

About half an hour west of Avignon, the Pont du Gard is the tallest surviving Roman aqueduct, 160 feet high, built in the 1st century AD to carry water from a spring near Uzès to the Roman colony at Nîmes, roughly 30 miles away. 

The engineering is what floors you. The whole 30-mile channel drops only about 40 feet in elevation across its length, an average gradient of 1 in 3,000, cut by hand with iron tools and calculated without anything you’d recognize as modern math. It delivered around 10 million gallons of water a day into Nîmes at its peak.

The bridge itself is 3 tiers of arches in golden limestone, and the stones were cut so precisely that the whole structure was built without mortar in the arches. Some of the blocks weigh 6 tons. You can still see the projecting stubs the Romans left on the outer stones as scaffolding supports, because they clearly expected to return and perform maintenance.

You can do the lower part of the bridge for free, but parking, the museum, and the walking tour have fees. The site charges by the car, around 9 euros in low season and up to 26 euros in peak summer, and the parking lots at either end fill by 10 am in July and August. Come at 8 am or after 6 pm. 

Evening is my pick, when the stone turns from beige to a soft apricot, and most of the day-trippers have gone. Bring a swimsuit if you like a river swim. The Gardon runs right underneath, and people have been swimming here for a couple of thousand years.

Les Baux-de-Provence 

Les Baux is a ruined medieval fortress built into a limestone spur in the Alpilles, and the lords of Baux who held it in the 12th and 13th centuries claimed descent from one of the Three Kings.

Louis XIII had the castle demolished in 1633 after the town backed the wrong side one too many times, and what’s left is a spectacular skeleton of walls, catapults, and a village of 22 permanent residents that gets 1.5 million visitors a year.

Go at 9 am on the dot or after 5 pm. The Carrières des Lumières just below the village, a former limestone quarry now used for immersive projected art shows across 46-foot walls, is worth an hour of your time either before or after. Book the Carrières online. The walk-up line is brutal.

Ocher Trail at Roussillon

Roussillon, an hour east of Les Baux-de-Provence, sits atop what was once one of Europe’s largest ocher deposits. The village houses are painted every shade from butter yellow to blood red because that’s what came out of the ground. 

Between 1780 and the 1930s, the ocher trade employed hundreds of families here. Synthetic pigments killed the industry after World War Two. The Sentier des Ocres, a 30 or 60-minute walking loop through the old quarries, is the thing to do, and I’d wear shoes you don’t love because the dust turns everything rust-colored. 

Park in the lower lot and walk up. The upper one fills by 10:30.

Gordes and Sénanque Abbey

Gordes is the perched village you’ve seen on the cover of every Provence book ever printed, a stack of pale stone houses climbing a hillside above the Luberon valley.

It was fortified in the 11th century, sacked during the Wars of Religion, damaged again in an earthquake in 1909, and rebuilt each time using the same dry-stone method the Romans left behind. 

André Lhote and Marc Chagall lived here in the 1940s, and the artists more or less put it on the tourist map.

Gordes itself is very pretty and very expensive, and you can walk through the whole village in 20 minutes. The real reason to come is the Cistercian abbey of Sénanque, 2.5 miles down a hairpin road in a hidden valley below. 

The monks arrived in 1148, built the church between 1160 and 1220 in the deliberately plain Cistercian style, and a small community of them still lives there today. In late June and early July, the lavender field in front of the abbey blooms. That’s the photograph.

For Sénanque, park in Gordes and walk the 2.5 miles down through the scrub rather than driving, because the abbey lot is tiny and the road is single-track with tour buses trying to turn around on it. 

Aim for opening at 9:45 am or the last afternoon slot; book the guided tour in advance if you want to see the cloister, and remember it’s a working monastery, so shoulders and knees covered. 

For lunch, skip Gordes and drive 15 minutes to Ménerbes, where Peter Mayle wrote A Year in Provence. 

L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue

L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is a small town built on islands in the middle of the Sorgue River, with mossy water wheels turning in the current that used to power silk mills, tanneries, and paper factories. 

There were 66 water wheels here at the industry’s peak in the 19th century. About 15 still turn, and the river runs an unnerving shade of emerald because it’s spring-fed and stays around 55 degrees Fahrenheit all year.

The town is famous for two things: antiques and the Sunday market. It’s the third-largest antiques hub in Europe after Paris and London, with around 300 permanent dealers spread across dozens of village-within-a-village arcades called villages d’antiquaires. 

The big open-air brocante fairs happen twice a year at Easter and August 15, and they’re mobbed. For a regular visit, come on a Sunday morning when the food market takes over the streets, and the antique dealers are all open. 

Get there by 8:30 am, park at the sports complex on the edge of town and walk in, and eat lunch at one of the riverside places before 12:30 because after that the line stretches around the corner.

If you like the water aspect, drive 20 minutes east to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, where the Sorgue actually rises out of the ground. The spring is one of the largest in the world by output, pumping up to 21,000 gallons per second in spring flood, from a cave whose bottom nobody managed to reach until a robotic submersible touched down at 1,010 feet in 1985. 

Petrarch lived here in the 14th century and wrote a fair chunk of his poetry to Laura from a house by the river.

The Verdon Gorge

Two hours east of Gordes, the Verdon River has cut a canyon 15 miles long and up to 2,300 feet deep through the limestone plateau, and the water at the bottom is a milky turquoise from suspended limestone particles. It’s the deepest gorge in Europe. 

The Route des Crêtes on the north rim is a 14-mile one-way loop with about a dozen belvederes cut into the cliff edge, and driving it in the wrong direction (which happens) gets you stuck behind camper vans for the rest of the afternoon. Go clockwise from La Palud-sur-Verdon.

At the western end, the river empties into the Lac de Sainte-Croix, an artificial lake created in 1974 when the Verdon was dammed, and the village of Les Salles-sur-Verdon was flooded. The old village is still down there under the water. 

You can rent an electric boat or a kayak from the beach at the Pont du Galetas and paddle into the mouth of the gorge itself. Water temperature in July is a bracing 68 degrees or so.

Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, the village hanging off the cliff above the western end of the gorge, is worth the stop for its famous faience pottery, made here since 1679, and the strange gold star suspended on a chain between two cliff peaks 700 feet above the village. 

Legend has it that a Crusader knight named Blacas hung it there in the 13th century as thanks for surviving captivity. The chain has been replaced 7 times over the centuries, most recently in 1957. Have lunch here rather than in the gorge villages, which are more touristy.

Aix-en-Provence

Aix is where you catch your breath. Founded by the Romans in 123 BC on the site of hot springs (Aquae Sextiae, hence the name), it was the capital of Provence from the 12th century until the French Revolution, and the whole center is 17th and 18th-century hôtels particuliers built by parliamentarians who had money and wanted to show it. 

The Cours Mirabeau, the tree-lined main drag, was laid out in the 1650s over the old town wall and is still the best people-watching street in the region.

Paul Cézanne was born here in 1839, lived here most of his life, and painted Mont Sainte-Victoire, the limestone ridge that dominates the eastern horizon, more than 80 times.

His studio, the Atelier des Lauves, is preserved on a hill just north of the center exactly as he left it in 1906, right down to the coat hanging by the door and the skulls and ginger jars he used as still-life props. 

One of the food specialties here is the calisson, a small almond-and-melon candy shaped like an almond, sold in beautiful boxes for eye-watering prices. Buy them at Léonard Parli on Avenue Victor Hugo, which has been making them since 1874, and skip the souvenir places on Rue Espariat. 

For a market, the Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday food market on Place Richelme is the one to go to, and be there by 9 am.

Cassis and the Calanques

Cassis is a small fishing port about 30 minutes east of Marseille, and it’s what most people picture when they imagine the south of France coast without the Riviera prices. 

Pastel houses around a working harbor, a tiny beach, a ruined 14th-century castle on the headland now converted into a hotel, and white wine you can’t easily find outside the region because the appellation only covers about 500 acres and 12 producers.

The real reason to come is what’s just west of town: the Calanques, narrow limestone inlets with cliffs plunging straight into water so clear you can see the bottom 30 feet down. The Calanques National Park was created in 2012 and covers about 20 miles of coast between Marseille and Cassis. 

The three closest to Cassis are Port-Miou, Port-Pin, and En-Vau, and they get progressively more spectacular and more difficult to reach on foot. En-Vau is the postcard, but it’s a 90-minute walk over rocky ground in either direction, with no shade. 

In July and August, the park closes the trails on high fire-risk days, sometimes announced only the evening before, so check the Bouches-du-Rhône préfecture site the night before you go.

The less punishing option is a boat tour from Cassis harbor. Boats leave every 45 minutes in season, and the 65-minute tour covers 5 calanques; the 3-calanque tour is 45 minutes.

The boats don’t stop for swimming, which is the one thing that would make them perfect, so if you want to swim you need to take the small taxi-boat to Calanque de Sormiou or make the walk to Port-Pin, which is the most manageable of the three on foot at about 45 minutes each way. 

Late afternoon light in the Calanques, when the cliffs turn white-gold and the water goes navy at the mouths, is worth timing your trip for.