Provence's ochre village — a hilltop settlement of glowing red and orange stone in the Luberon
Roussillon is a Provençal hill village in the Vaucluse department, built almost entirely from the local ochre — a mineral pigment rock ranging from pale yellow to deep burnt orange — whose facades glow in the afternoon light like an alchemist's dream. The Sentier des Ocres (Ochre Trail, 30–50 minutes on foot) winds through the former ochre quarries on the edge of the village: a canyon-like landscape of eroded ochre formations in seventeen natural shades from bright yellow to deep violet-red. The Luberon Natural Park surrounds the village; the Luberon is lavender country and the nearest lavend…
Roussillon sits on one of the richest natural ochre deposits in the world — a 25km seam of ochre-bearing sandstone (the Colorado of Provence) that made this region the center of the global ochre industry from the late 18th century to the mid-20th century. The mining company Societé des Ocres de France extracted and processed ochre here from 1785 until synthetic iron oxides made natural ochre uneconomic in the 1950s; the last ochre factory in Roussillon closed in 1960, leaving the quarry landscape that is now protected and open to visitors. Samuel Beckett lived in Roussillon during World War I…