Hilltop village in France
We got to Gourdon early, while the village was still waking up. Shutters going up one by one, old lady setting up her shop and barely any tourists in sight. Amber and Sébastien absolutely love Gourdon yet every visit feels magical, even it assemble itself for the day. Gourdon has the title of one of the most beautiful villages in France. The way it is built into the mountainside above the valley, tucked so far into the rock must play a big part in it. Most of its alleyways are barely wide enough for one person, stone underfoot, shopfronts in ochre and blue close enough to touch on either side. As a result,you end up walking single file whether you meant to or not. Another quirk of this village are the cats everywhere. The loose, sun-warmed gangs of them will be lounging on the warm cobbled stones in this part of Provence, entirely unbothered by the two people quietly falling in love with the place around them.
We spent the morning tasting our way along one street, jam after jam, made from things that don't usually end up in a jar: lavender, rose, fennel, coquelicot, the papery red poppy that lines every roadside in Provence come summer. There's something quietly disarming about tasting a rose the way you'd taste a raspberry, and I watched both of them work out, one spoonful at a time, that this tiny village had more going on than either had expected. Amber kept going back for the lavender. Somewhere in the middle of it, a hat got tried on, then bought, because standing in that light without one starts to feel like a mistake.
Then the view opened up, Gourdon sits high enough that the whole valley drops away beneath it, all the way to the coast on a clear day, and the two of them just stood there for a while, taking it in properly, not saying much. I've learned to leave those silences alone. They're usually doing more work than a posed shot ever could.
Caussols was the plan for the afternoon. It's hard to overstate how little it has in common with where we'd just spent the morning. Gourdon is close and warm and colourful. Caussols is none of those things. It's a high pale limestone plateau that's nearly empty. Sheep graze where there's anything worth grazing on. It's about as close to lunar as this coastline gets, which is presumably why they built an observatory up there. The landscape is built for wide skies since there's not much else competing for attention.
We stopped for a handful of pictures where the plateau runs out into that late afternoon light.
Just Amber and Sébastien in the last light of the day, small against all that open ground.
