Fontaine-de-Vaucluse: My Favorite Non-Hilltop Village in Provence, France

In Provence, as in Tuscany, I find hilltop villages particularly delightful. I'm not sure I'd want to live in one, but they look good from a distance. Among those I saw in Provence, I was especially struck by Baux, Gordes, La Coste, and Roussilon. Along with the major Provencale cities of Aix, Arles, and Avignon, a village through which water streams that particularly struck me as a place in which I wish someone would secure me a house for some time in the spring, summer, or fall is Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. ("Fontaine" means spring, as well as fountain; "Vaucluse" means closed valley), 25 km east of Avignon.

The "fontaine," just above the town at the foot of a 230-meter-high cliff is where the Sorgue first appears above ground. The spring is the only drainage from a subterranean basin of 1200 square kilometers, including Mount Ventoux, the Vaucluse and Lure mountains. Sometimes in the autumn, one can see the water coming up from a hole at the base of the cliff. When we were there in April, the pool at the foot of the cliff was very full. There was only slight evidence of water bubbling up from below, but it was rushing out from the pool in great volume.

The largest-volume spring in France (fifth largest in the world) feeds a veritable torrent during the time mountain snow is melting. Nesting under a bridge in the village of Fontaine-de-Vaucluse was a pair of the archetypal torrent bird, the dipper (white-throated ones, unlike the plainer American ones). Birds that go into rushing water are a special delight to watch.

The pair of dippers and the torrent of spring were not the only interesting sights in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. The town is overlooked by the ruins of the castle of the Bishop of Cavaillon, a 14th-century hilltop fortress that would be called an "alcazar" in Spain or Portugal. The village was up there in the 7th century.