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Almost everybody visiting falls in love with the place. It is one of those Provencal hilltop villages that has escaped the last fifty years and where it is still possible to imagine that you are in the long vanished old France : the onion seller, old men with black berets and even the horse and cart.

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There are magnificent views all the way from the coastal range to the south across a vast expanse of hills and forests to the isolated peak of Mount Ventoux to the north.

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Being on the way to precisely nowhere Tourtour gets little traffic. It has been largely diverted around the village leaving it effectively pedestrianised. Tourtour remains largely unchanged; a cluster of tight-knit terraced houses, twisting narrow streets and tiny passageways set among fields and woods. It is a village that rejects the straight line and the right angle: walls curve, roads meander, roofs undulate and doorways sag; the result is that no two houses are the same…

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Tourtour is the archetypal French village with everything that imagination demands: remains of turreted towers, old olive presses, a washing place, flowing springs and a main square shaded by great plane trees.

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Tourtour bills itself as “Le village dans le ciel”, ‘the village in the sky’, which has an appropriately celestial overtone; after all “le village du ciel” would be ‘the village of heaven’. It’s a phrase that even in mid-January one would be reluctant to argue with…

Highlights

Place des Ormeaux	The old square with café-restaurant tables surround a pair of tall olive trees. These oliviers replaced a pair of enormous elms planted in 1638 when Anne d’Autriche stopped here on her pilgramage to Cotignac. The square is named after those now-gone elm trees.
Chateau du Raphélis	A storybook 16th-century chateau with four round towers sits at the southeast end of the village. This pretty, Medieval castle houses the Tourtour town hall (Mairie) and the post office. Up until 1970 it was also the village school.
Chateau Vieux	There’s another Medieval chateau, at the north end of Tourtour, called the Chateau Vieux. This “Old Chateau” has a pair of round towers and is clearly visible along the northwest side of the village. The Old Chateau houses an art gallery, but is otherwise closed to the public.
Eglise Saint-Denis	A Romanesque church which sits a little higher than the main village. There’s is a panorama panel and a magnificant view out across the surrounding countryside.
Olive-oil mill	There’s a 17th-century olive-oil mill on Rue des Moulins, at the far western edge of the old village. When olive oil production diminished in the region, this one mill was kept as the communal mill.The Tourtour olive-oil mill is today open in the summer as a living-mill museum and art museum. During the winter olive season, mid-December to January or February, it’s still used as a functioning communal olive-oil mill for local growers. The mill is open to visitors during this period.
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