Photo Gallery
Rick Wright
Our mornings begin at a civilized hour, with a lavish breakfast in our Arles hotel…
…just around the corner from the city’s Roman theater, still used for drama and music performances.
Nearly as old, the necropolis of the Alyscamps was memorably painted by van Gogh.
Here depicted with only one ear, the artist created some of his most memorable paintings in Arles…
…inspired by the city’s secluded side streets…
…architectural monuments…
…and the bright skies and warm colors of Provence.
Saturdays in Arles find the road outside our hotel lined with enticing market displays…
…while country towns engage in their own traditional pageantry.
All of Provence is one great outdoor museum, but the Museum of Ancient Arles is well worth a special visit…
…to admire the many dramatically carved marble sarcophaguses it houses.
Centuries later, the medieval sculptors of Provence were still creating artistic treasures to match any in Europe…
…and ornamenting castles and palaces like Les Baux…
…whose self-styled “Lords” traced their ancestry to the magus Balthasar.
On the cliffs below, Rockroses dot the limestone slopes of Les Alpilles…
…and other aromatic plants attract butterflies and moths.
The nearby steppe of La Crau harbors France’s most important populations of open-country specialties…
…and a morning’s stroll here can produce Little Bustard, Stone-curlew, and Greater Short-toed Lark…
…alongside more widespread species such as European Roller…
…or Eurasian Hoopoe…
…the unofficial mascot of St-Martin’s Crau Museum.
The largest town in La Crau, St-Martin offers its own lunchtime delights.
The reedbeds and marshes of the Camargue occasionally reveal such skulking rarities as Little Bittern or Purple Swamphen…
while the showy Little Egret is rarely out of sight.
Longest-legged of all, some 20,000 pairs of Greater Flamingos breed on a single island here, flying out to feed in roadside ponds on the approach to Stes-Maries.
The fortified church of Stes-Maries is a major pilgrimage site for Europe’s gypsies, who make their offerings to the crypt’s lavishly draped effigy of St. Sara.
The elegant Black-headed Gull is among the most frequently observed of the area’s 10 or more species of larid.
Mudflats are the nesting grounds of pale little Kentish Plovers…
…while a few pairs of White Storks nest in treetops and on human structures.
Light, flavorful, and exquisitely presented, the food of Provence is as memorable as its birds.
Cetti’s Warblers and Common Nightingales provide the table music for our picnic in the eastern Camargue.
The 2,000-year-old Pont du Gard, one of the great marvels of Roman engineering, offers a nesting site to Alpine Swifts and Crag Martins.