Fontaine de Vaucluse

The Fountaine de Vaucluse, for which the entire department is named, was just a short side trip from the main road between Avignon and Gordes. It is pretty famous as one of the largest springs in the world - essentially an entire raging river flows fully formed, directly up from a hole at the base of some high cliffs and becomes the river Sorgue. When we were in the area, Francois was not even sure that the village was open to visitors - the recent rains had swollen the river to much more than the normal flow rate - I think he said something like 200 cubic meters of water per second were flowing up from the earth recently, causing the officials to limit access to the area out of concerns for safety! (That sounds ridiculously high, but I looked up the spring online, and the annual flow rate is about 630 million cubic meters per year, or an average of about 20 cubic meters per second, so 200 would only be ten times that....)

Needless to say, this is a huge amount of water. And a lot of the success of Provence as a historically rich farming region is due to the availability of this water for irrigation and more importantly for transport to market, and for motive power for linen mills for textiles, grain mills for grain, and to a lesser degree for manufacturing.

The water was roaring and swishing - running almost right up against the bottom of some of the bridges. There was even a low wall along the village square which was barely holding back water from inundating the town. Walking up toward the source, there is a ruined paper mill that you can visit, and a large stone plaza from which you can observe the river as it surges and falls. There is a ruined fortification high over the village as well, looking down on the steep, narrow valley - 'Vaucluse' is apparently adapted from the Provencal words for 'Closed Valley' or something like that.

More photos and videos here at my flickr.com site