Forcalquier and Salagon: The Count's City and the Priory Gardens

Required Activities

• Climb the citadel hill to Notre-Dame de Provence, find the musician angels and the saints of Provence carved on it, then go out to the edge of the summit terrace and count the 18 bells of the 1920s carillon that is still played by fist — it rings every Sunday at 11.30 and on the big feast days

• Go into Notre-Dame du Bourguet, a co-cathedral since a bishop of Sisteron who could not get into his own city took refuge here in 1060, and which Urban II visited on 7 August 1096 on his way back from preaching the first crusade — then look for how bare it is, because the whole treasure was carried off to the foundry on 25 March 1794. Finish at the 13th-century convent of the Cordeliers, which the Huguenots took over for their own worship from 1567

• Walk the lower terrace of the town cemetery, laid out in 1835, where the yews have been clipped to four metres since the start of the 20th century into walls of greenery cut through with arcades — stand in one of the openings and look down the full length of the perspective it frames

• Work through the six hectares of gardens at Salagon and finish four of them: the medieval garden Pierre Lieutaghi laid out, with its kitchen plot, its medicinal squares and its corner of poisonous and magical plants; the scent garden, where you take at least one of the five olfactory trails; the noria garden, where the old chain-well still lifts water into a basin used for gravity irrigation; and the willow collection, one of very few in the south of France

• Go into the priory church at Salagon, listed since 1922, and work out where the two naves of the 12th-century building join, then look at the contemporary stained glass Aurelie Nemours put into it in 1998 — and on the way out cross the two cobbled courtyards of the Renaissance prior's lodging