Ubaye: White Water, the Mexican Villas of Barcelonnette and the Fort de Tournoux

Required Activities

• Raft the Ubaye from a base at Méolans-Revel, on the torrent that carried the French kayak championships in 2016 and that starts as a trickle at 3,076 m on the Italian frontier, and get out downstream to look back up at the gradient you have just come down

• Visit the Musée de la Vallée inside the Villa Sapinière and find the porch on the way in, held up by columns carved with rosettes, and the rusticated ashlar of a villa built to look like a Mexican department store owner's town house

• Walk the villa quarters of Barcelonnette and Jausiers and find two in particular: the Villa Bleue of 1931, art deco, built for the founder of the Francia Marítima store with stained glass by Jacques Grüber, and the twin-towered Villa Javelly of 1913 — then notice how the new suburbs have grown up around houses that were built in open fields

• Take the guided tour of the Batterie des Caurres, the upper part of the Fort de Tournoux, and look down the 700 m of mountainside the fortress covers, from the barracks at 1,290 m in the valley floor to Serre-de-l'Aut at 2,008 m — then pick out the ventilation holes in the cliff face that mark the staircase cut through the rock between them