Tourtour

Tourtour calls itself le village dans le ciel — the village in the sky — and at 635 m on a ridge in the Haut-Var it earns it: on a clear day the view runs from the Sainte-Baume massif to Mont Ventoux and, in winter, the Alps.

It is one of the Most Beautiful Villages of France, it has about 500 inhabitants, and it sits in the empty quarter of Provence between the Verdon and the coast that most itineraries skip entirely.

The village

Everything happens on the Place des Ormeaux, a square shaded by elms with cafés round three sides and the view off the fourth. The trees have a small story: the originals were planted in 1638 to mark the end of a plague, replanted after they died, and replanted again after the disease of the 1990s.

Around it:

• Two castles — the twelfth-century château communal, now the town hall, and the sixteenth-century Château de Saint-Ferréol at the other end
• The old oil mill of the seventeenth century, restored and working, which still presses in season
• Église Saint-Denis — eleventh-century, standing apart from the village on the ridge, with the best of the view
• The vaulted passages and gateways through the old walls

It takes half an hour to walk and there is not a great deal to do beyond looking, eating and buying olive oil — which is the correct use of Tourtour.

History

Tourtour lies roughly 50 km inland from the coast, west of Fréjus and north-west of Draguignan.

The old centre grew in two stages: a north-western quarter dating from the eleventh century, and a south-eastern quarter around the main square added in the fourteenth. The older streets are narrower and steeper, and the houses smaller, than in the later quarter.

Three defensive walls can still be traced through the village: the oldest, around the earliest houses and the medieval castle; a second, largely followed today by a lane of old cellar doorways dated to the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading up to the main street and the Place des Ormeaux; and a third, seventeenth-century wall enclosing the château communal and the Sainte-Trinité chapel. On the north side the wall line is formed by the backs of houses, on the south by terraced gardens.

Also in the old town

On the south-eastern side, a gate in the first town wall — the Portalet — still carries its bell, beside a small square with an old fountain and the Sainte-Trinité chapel, built in the seventeenth century.

The château communal, painted in pale colours with a round tower at each corner, also houses the post office and the tourist office. The “fortified at every corner” style is typical of the area and turns up again on similar buildings in the town of Sault. Below the château, Place Annabel et Bernard Buffet is where the market sets up and where locals play pétanque. It is named after the painter Bernard Buffet and his wife Annabel, whose last home was just outside the village.

Other minor sights along the streets include a fossil museum, an open-air theatre, a wash-house, and the remains of two medieval castles, their doorways and the maze of streets and squares around them little altered since.

Église Saint-Denis

The church stands alone near the cemetery on the hilltop, apart from the rest of the village, beside a viewing table naming the landmarks in sight. Inside are two sixteenth-century busts, of Saint Stephen and Saint Nicholas. The present building replaced an earlier church first recorded in the Middle Ages; small storage jars from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, found nearby, helped date that first church. It was restored in 1874 and again in 1932.

The countryside

The Haut-Var around the village is oak and pine, truffle ground in winter, with olive groves and vineyards on the terraces. It is walking country and almost empty: marked paths run from the village in several directions, including to the megalithic dolmens on the plateau above.

Just outside the village

A short walk north along the Rue du Lavoir, on the village’s eastern side, gives a view over the fields and rooftops below.

On the road to Aups, about 800 m out, stands the Tour de Grimaud, a tower sometimes — incorrectly — called the Tour Grimaldi.

Below the village, a single-arched old bridge crosses the river Florieye; it is known locally as the Roman bridge.

North-east of the village, the Château de la Baume, with its chapel, dovecote and waterfall, was the last home of Bernard Buffet and his wife Annabel.

Getting to Tourtour

• By car — the only way. An hour from Draguignan and the A8, an hour and a half from Nice or Aix. See parking in France.
• No bus, no station. The nearest railway is at Les Arcs-Draguignan, 40 km.

Around Tourtour

• Villecroze — 5 km, with cave dwellings cut into a tufa cliff and a waterfall
• Salernes — 8 km, which has made floor tiles since the eighteenth century and still does
• Cotignac — 20 km, built against a 80 m tufa cliff with houses in the rock
• Aups — 10 km, the truffle capital of the Var, with a Thursday market and a winter truffle market
• Les Arcs, Lorgues and Flayosc — three more villages of character in this part of the Haut-Var
• Abbaye du Thoronet — 40 minutes south, one of the three great Cistercian abbeys of Provence and the purest of them
• Gorges du Verdon — 45 minutes north, and Moustiers beyond it

What to eat

Olive oil from the village mill, truffles in winter from Aups, goat cheese, and the Coteaux Varois wines from the valley below. See Provençal cuisine.

When to go

May, June, September and October. The Haut-Var is inland and hot in July and August, but it is also far less crowded than either the coast or the Luberon at any time of year — Tourtour on a weekday in June is close to empty.

Winter is when the view is best: cold, clear, and the Alps on the horizon.

See when to visit Provence.

Weather in Tourtour

Updated: 1 October 2026