Roussillon, Sénanque and Gordes: Ochre, a Cistercian Abbey and the Lavender Museum

Required Activities

• Walk the long circuit of the Sentier des Ocres at Roussillon, the 60-minute of the two waymarked loops through the abandoned quarries, and pick out the eroded pinnacles known as the aiguilles des fées standing above the ochre face called the chaussée des géants

• Drive down the hairpins of the D177 north of Gordes to the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque, founded on 23 June 1148 and still worked by a community of six Cistercian monks, and inside find the chapter house with the tiered stone benches the monks sat on, and the cloister galleries whose arcades rest on capitals carved with water leaves

• Photograph Gordes from the terrace below the Renaissance château (rebuilt 1525 on an 11th-century base) looking south over the dry-stone borie-dotted Luberon valley

• In the Musée de la Lavande at Coustellet, founded in 1991 by the distiller Georges Lincelé, work along the line of copper stills from the 17th century to the present and find the Roue Garnier of 1902, then smell true fine lavender against the cheaper lavandin in the shop