The region

One hour’s drive, four different Provences

At twelve, people want different things. Some want the markets and the cafés, some want to swim in a river, some want the sea, and some will not move from the pool all week.

Le Mas de l’Olivière is one of the few places from which all of that fits into the same day. Four different Provences lie within an hour, and everyone still comes home for dinner together.

The fields and hills around the house seen from above; the house’s pool bottom right, mountains on the horizon.

The city — Aix-en-Provence, 35 minutes

The Cours Mirabeau, the morning markets, the museums and the cafés. Marseille and the Vieux-Port are fifty minutes away.

The villages — the Luberon, 50 minutes

Lourmarin and the hill villages, Provençal markets, artisans’ workshops and antiques fairs.

The water — the Verdon, one hour

Lac d’Esparron and its creeks, reached by electric boat, under an hour away. The Verdon gorges, Moustiers-Sainte-Marie and the Lac de Sainte-Croix, seventy kilometres (about 45 miles). Enough for two full days without seeing the same landscape twice.

The sea — Cassis, one hour

The calanques, the harbour, and the beaches of the Var coast a little further on.

Walking, straight from the house

Three routes start from the property, from half an hour there and back to a good two hours. Put your boots on after breakfast; no car needed.

To Château Vignelaure, through the woods

The walk starts at the entrance to the drive: leave it on your left and climb the small hill. A path runs alongside the drive at first, then joins a wider track — stay on the main track and ignore the side paths. It climbs to the top of the Vignelaure vineyards. From there, carry straight on towards the château to join the road, and come back across the fields opposite the house.

To make it longer, take the road the other way: it leads to a branch of the Canal de Provence, which you can follow for a while.

To the Chapelle Saint-Pierre

Same start, but keep heading south instead of turning west. Allow an hour each way — a little under four kilometres (2.5 miles) through the woods.

On the 1823 land survey, the surveyor marked “Ruine des Templiers” near the hill, a few hundred metres from the chapel, and set one of his triangulation points there. What is left of it today, we are still looking for.

To Domaine de la Réaltière, to the north

The starting point is a quarter of an hour’s walk from the house, or three minutes by car. The track climbs, skirts the estate — another vineyard — and you come back down the small road to where you started.

And, along the edge of the property, the old Canal du Verdon

Dug between 1866 and 1875 to bring water from the Verdon to Aix-en-Provence, eighty-two kilometres long from the dam at Quinson, it was abandoned in the 1970s when the Canal de Provence replaced it. Its course can still be walked, from Rians to Jouques.

Further afield — the Sainte-Victoire

Twenty minutes by car, the trailheads for Montagne Sainte-Victoire and the Pic des Mouches, which tops out at 1,011 metres (3,317 ft) — the highest point of the range, and the finest view in the region on a clear day.

From the high ground of the property: the pool, the trees of the grounds, then fields and wooded hills to the horizon.

Scrubland, olive trees and tall cypresses above a dry-stone wall, in the evening light.

And close by

Two villages within eight kilometres for everything you need, and a Provençal market on Sunday mornings. The organic wine estates of the Provence Verte start a few minutes from the house, and several receive visitors by appointment.

Two thousand years of vines

A few kilometres from the house, excavations at the Domaine des Toulons have uncovered a Roman wine estate built shortly after the middle of the first century AD: two pressing halls, vats of fifty to eighty hectolitres, and jar-cellars holding more than three thousand hectolitres — the equivalent of four hundred thousand bottles. Wine was made there for two hundred years.

A little further on, the church of Saint-Estève is first recorded in 1092. A village grew around it in the twelfth century, and it was still a priory in the seventeenth. Château Vignelaure, at the end of one of our walks, once bore that same name of Saint-Estève.

Nor is this a distant neighbour: on the land survey, Sainte-Estève is the place-name right next to ours.

The organic estates that surround the house today are continuing, without thinking about it, a very old habit.

Sources: “Canal du Verdon”, Wikipedia (French) · Grand Site Concors Sainte-Victoire · Jean-Pierre Brun, Collège de France (Les Toulons villa) · Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel, Région Sud, file IA83003180 (Saint-Estève).