Moustiers-Sainte-Marie and the Lac de Sainte-Croix: The Star, the Faience and the Lake

Required Activities

• Stand in the village and follow the 135 m chain across the ravine to the star, then count its points: five, on a 115 cm star hung in 1957, not the sixteen of the Blacas legend — and it fell again in 1995 and was found at the bottom of the ravine before the village paid to have it regilded

• In the faience museum, founded in 1929, find work by all three of the old masters — Clérissy, Olérys and Ferrat — then go into a working atelier in the village and pick out the local flowers and insects Marcel Provence's painters put on their pieces from 1925

• Take a pedalo, an electric boat or a sailing dinghy out on the Lac de Sainte-Croix — petrol engines are banned, so the only noise is the wind — and work your way up to the Pont du Galetas where the Verdon comes out of its gorge

• Walk the shore at Les Salles-sur-Verdon and look across to Bauduen and Sainte-Croix-du-Verdon on the far banks — the two villages saved when the planned water level was dropped from 500 m to 482 in 1968, leaving Les Salles the only one condemned

• Climb the way of the cross above the village, counting the oratories with their enamelled plaques, to the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Beauvoir — find the Renaissance wooden door, then inside pick out where the two Romanesque bays of the nave give way to the Gothic ones, and look out from the terrace over the Maire valley and the Valensole plateau