The Luberon Villages: Bonnieux, Lacoste, Ménerbes and the Pont Julien

Required Activities

• Climb the stepped lanes of Bonnieux to the Vieille Église, listed since 1980, and find where the Romanesque work gives way to Gothic in the same building — then from the terrace outside pick out Lacoste on its own spur across the plain, mont Ventoux beyond it, and on the way back down the remains of the 12th-century towers and walls and the thirty-metre tour Philippe of the late 19th century

• Walk the cobbled calade streets of Lacoste up to the walls of Sade's castle, where he built himself a theatre for 120 spectators during his longest stay in 1772, then go round to the quarries beside it, which supplied the stone for the Roman towns of Apta Julia and Caballio and now hold a summer festival — and on the way, the 12th-century church of Saint-Trophime, the fountain and the lavoir

• At Ménerbes find both medieval gates, Saint-Sauveur and Notre-Dame, and the citadel on the point of the spur, then drop to the corkscrew museum at the foot of the village and pick your favourite out of more than a thousand of them — and on the road back towards Lacoste stop at the abbey of Saint-Hilaire on the hillside, the first Carmelite house built in the Comtat Venaissin

• Walk or cycle across the Pont Julien, 5 km north of Bonnieux, and take in what you are standing on: a Roman bridge of 3 BC carrying the Via Domitia over the Calavon, more than 40 m across, which was still taking the traffic of the D149 until 2005 — look for the two flood openings pierced through the piers, and the wear of two thousand years of wheels on the deck

• Drive up from Bonnieux towards Lourmarin into the 250 hectares of the cedar forest, stopping at the viewpoint on the way where the montagne Sainte-Victoire comes into sight, then walk under the trees — every one of them descended from seed brought from the Moroccan Atlas and planted here in 1862 under Napoleon III