Things To Do in Gordes

Gordes is best explored on foot. Its primarily pedestrianized streets unwind downhill from the Château de Gordes, the Renaissance rehabilitation of a 12th-century fortress. Its windows still bear grooves from bows and arrows used to protect Gordes during Gallo-Roman times, when it was a border town. Today Gordes is more likely to be invaded by easels. Its austere beauty has drawn many artists, including Marc Chagall and Hungarian painter Victor Vasarely, who spent summers here gathering inspiration for his geometric abstract art.

The town also has a literary heritage, as the last home of the great existential novelist and author Albert Camus (1913–60). Author of “The Stranger,” among many other works, Algerian-born Camus moved to France at the age of 25. Member of the French Resistance, political journalist, and philosopher, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” That same year, drawn by its “solemn and austere landscape despite its bewildering beauty,” Camus and his wife moved to Lourmarin, 30km (18 miles) southeast of Gordes along D36. Just two years later, Camus was killed in a car accident near Paris. According to his wishes, he was buried in Lourmarin’s cemetery.

In 1999, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy—with whom Camus would have had little in common philosophically or politically—proposed moving the writer’s ashes to the Pantheon in Paris, to rest aside such literary giants as Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Emile Zola. His descendants politely declined.

This is also a terrific base for hikers and nature lovers, as Gordes is part of the Parc Naturel Régional du Luberon (www.parcduluberon.fr).