Most village in Provence sport the same hues…limestone walls, blue/gray shutters, vines and roses climbing up the walls, but Roussillon dresses differently. The village looks as if a painter has come with her palette - the houses glow clay-pink, rust-red and sunflower-gold. Even the dust underfoot is red.
Roussillon is a geological tale. Millions of years ago, this part of the Luberon was covered by a warm, shallow sea. Iron oxide seeped into the sandstone, staining it the palette we see today: reds from the rusted iron, yellows and bunt orange from oxidization. Nature left behind a quarry the looks like a giant overturned jars of pigment.
Villagers learned to grind the rock into pigment and smear it onto the walls of their homes. The result: a town that is literally painted by the earth on which it sits.
By the late 18th century, ochre had become an industry here. The quarries around Roussillon were mined, the earth crushed, washed, and dried into powders fine enough to tint plaster, textiles, artists’ paints and even makeup. Painters loved it because the pigments held their color, never fading with the sun. These pigments are still for purchase for painters today. And unlike synthetic paint, no two shades are ever quite the same; one handful of soil could lean toward peach, another toward burgundy.
During the Second World War, Samuel Beckett lived for two years in Roussillon, hiding from the Gestapo. He later spoke of how the peculiar light and color of the village seeped into his writing, tones of earth that seemed impossible to escape.
The village also carries a legend to explain the magical hues. The cliffs were stained with blood, a tragic love story of a lady who threw herself from their heights.
Just beyond the village, a footpath dives straight into the cliffs themselves. The Sentier des Ocres winds through what feels like an open-air painter’s studio: cliffs and rock formations striped crimson and gold, roots of pines clawing down into the sand, every turn a new shock of color. The ground is soft underfoot, the same powder once ground and washed into pigment. Walking there, you can see the layers as if the earth were sliced open, bands of rust, saffron, and violet-brown stacked like an unfinished canvas. It’s less a hike than a reminder: the village isn’t just perched beside these colors, it has been stroked by them.
In Provence, Roussillon stands apart. It’s not just another hilltop village with painted shutters, it is one where the architecture, landscape and earth collapse into one thing. A town brushed with magic.
