CR Adventures 28621: Gordes y Abbey de Senanque

Our hike starts in one of the most beautiful villages in France.
It’s origins come from Gallo-Roman times where it was the fortified settlement for the main city of Cavaillon. In the 4th century, it was inhabited by the Vordenses tribe (from where the name Gordes come from, it was customary then to switch V with G).
The hike continues through the mirad of interconnected paths between cultivated fields and beautiful stone buildings called Bories with their fascinating history.

The 18th century saw a wide scale campaign of land clearing and cultivation in the Provence, following a 1766 royal edict. The rush to the hills resulted in masses of stones being extracted from the ground to make way for new fields complete with dry stone walls and huts.

The potsherds found in the huts and fields during the restoration work of the 1970s are characteristic of the earthenware manufactured in the Apt, Vaucluse, region in the 18th-19th centuries.
The huts were built using locally extracted, 10 to 15 cm-thick, limestone slabs, going by the name of “lauses” or “clapes”.[
Here, limestone rock is everywhere. Tender, easy to extract and to shape, frost-resistant, it was already exploited by the Romans and today you can still find many quarries in the area. But the stone that best identifies the lithic landscape of the Monts de Vaucluse, and Gordes in particular, are the modest stones removed from the fields. All along the slopes of the Luberon mountain and the Monts de Vaucluse, men used exclusively this inexpensive and inexhaustible supply of stones, that required no transport and was accessible to all, to build thousands of dry-stone constructions, constructions that required hard work, patience and abundant labour. This rich and varied architectural heritage contributes to the identity of our landscape: clapas (piles of stone found on the edge of fields), restanques (terraces), retaining walls, enclosures, walls around fields or framing paths for kilometres, cisterns,"apiaries" or bee yards, huts or bories.
The countryside of Gordes still houses many of these magnificent heritage structures that are witness to this unique architecture before they disappear altogether.
Like any architecture, dry-stone buildings correspond to an evolution of French society.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the country had to cope with population growth and started a "bulimia of land" to avoid "grain shortages". The most impoverished farmers, labourers, and a small group of people acquired vacant and uncultivated land, often far from the villages.
Through hard work and relentless land-clearing efforts, these people conquered new lands from forests and scrubland and created fields where they developed new complementary activities.
During the creation of these plots, the stones removed from the ground using crowbars and then lifted out by ploughs were an inexhaustible and very economical godsend for building.
At that time in Provence, the hillsides and plateaux were colonized by farmers and dry-stone constructions which gave a new face to the countryside.
The generic local term for this type of construction is simply a “hut”. It is also the term that purists prefer because it is the name used by the older generations to designate these constructions. Yet today in the region it is the term “borie” that is commonly used.
Borie is the French equivalent of the Provençal word bori designating a farmhouse and comes from the medieval boveria, boria, or a livestock barn. In French, it is used indiscriminately in both the feminine and masculine forms.

We continue our hike through the beautiful countryside when we come across old farm houses that hold some more fascinating history from the Second World War paying tribute to those that gave up their lives to free France.

During the Second World War, Gordes was an important place of Resistance, which earned the village the Croix de guerre with silver star.

On August 21, 1944, a week after the landing on the coast of Provence, a patrol having been hit hard by the maquis, the village the next day was the victim of violent reprisals.
On August 22, the Germans forced the few inhabitants who could not find shelter into the houses, shooting those who lingered; then, having set up cannons opposite on the rock of Bel Air, they bombarded the village, destroying a dozen houses there, while several others were dynamited and then set on fire, mainly at the entrances to the city to obstruct the crossroads and thus slow down d potential pursuers. In total, twenty buildings were destroyed by reprisals or acts of war.
The militia had also been active in Gordes and many buildings were, citing this reason, looted and burned at the Liberation, including the house of the notary Villevieille which contained the notarial archives of the village. All this destruction earned the town the sad privilege of being one of the three “stricken towns” in the department of Vaucluse.
In total, thirteen people were killed or executed during the Second World War and it was the intervention of a monk from the Abbey of Sénanque with the Kommandantur that made it possible to avoid even more serious abuse. Twenty inhabitants fell under enemy bullets and five of them were taken to a foreign land.
Following these tragic hours, the city was cited in the order of the division on November 11, 1948. The War Cross with silver star was awarded to it with the following citation: "Martyred city which was under the Occupation one of the most active centers of the Resistance”.

This leads us into the magical world of the Abbey of Sénanque surrounded by amazing lavender fields giving off the most beautiful aroma.
Notre-Dame de Senanque is a Cistercian abbey near the village of Gordes in the department of the Vaucluse in Provence. The Senanque Abbey was founded in 1148 under the patronage of Alfant, bishop of Cavaillon, and Raymond Berenger II, Count of Provence, by Cistercian monks who came from Mazan Abbey in the Ardeche.
During the Wars of Religion the quarters for the lay brothers were destroyed and the Senanque Abbey was ransacked by Huguenots. The community was expelled 1903–1926 and departed to the Order's headquarters, Lerins Abbey on the island of St. Honorat, near Cannes. A small community returned in 1988.

The monks who live at Sénanque grow lavender visible in front of the abbey and tend honey bees for their livelihood.

A great hike through the beautiful French countryside and it’s history.