Gréoux-les-Bains and Valensole: The Spa and the Lavender

Required Activities

• Take a treatment at the Thermes de Gréoux-les-Bains, on sulphur water the Romans piped into baths here and dedicated to the spring nymphs — the Roman name of the place, Nymphis Griselicis, is literally the dedication — then find the troglodyte Roman baths cut into the rock and the first-century pool the archaeologists uncovered beside them

• Walk up to the castle Gréoux calls the Château des Templiers although no record puts the Templars here — it belonged to the counts of Provence from 1248 and then to the Hospitallers — and in its rectangular courtyard pick out the round tower on the north-east corner against the square keep on the north-west, which may go back to the 12th century

• On the hour-long tour of L'Occitane's manufacture at Manosque, follow one bottle from raw plant to filled pack on the production lines, then go out into the Mediterranean garden and find the growing plant behind the scent you smelled on the line

• Drive out onto the Valensole plateau and walk the verges and tracks between the lavandin rows — not into them, they are a crop on 81,400 hectares of working farmland — and find the three things that share the plateau with it: wheat, truffle oaks and the almond trees that were the plateau's money in the 19th century