Les Baux and Fontvieille: The Citadel, the Moulin Saint-Pierre and the Carrières des Lumières

Required Activities

• At the Château d'Estoublon outside Fontvieille, taste the single-variety olive oils against one another — Grossane, Salonenque, Bouteillan, Béruguette and Picholine, all crushed at the estate's own mill under the AOP Vallée des Baux-de-Provence — then judge its AOP Les Baux de Provence wine from the organic vines on the south flank of the Alpilles against the oil of the same ground

• Climb to the Moulin Saint-Pierre above Fontvieille, the 1814 mill that ground flour for over a century including for the army in the First World War, and inside pick out the two stones — the fixed meule gisante lying on the floor and the meule courante turning on the vertical shaft — then go down to the room built into the slope beneath it for the permanent Daudet exhibition put there by the Amis d'Alphonse Daudet

• Walk the ruined citadel of Les Baux out to the keep above the Val d'Enfer, then stand off the reconstructed siege engines on the plateau and watch a firing with real projectiles — a trebuchet 16 m high that the site calls the largest in France, alongside a bricole and a couillard

• In the Carrières des Lumières at Les Baux, follow the gallery that runs 60 m under the mountain into the hall the quarrymen left standing on natural pillars 5 to 10 m thick at the base and 7 to 9 m high, all of them used as projection screens, and find the small room showing extracts of Cocteau's Le Testament d'Orphée, filmed in these quarries in 1959