Cavaillon

Cavaillon is a working town of about 27,000 at the western gate of the Luberon, and it is not a picture-postcard village — which is rather the point. It is the market town the villages depend on, France’s largest fruit and vegetable wholesale market after Rungis, and the place whose name is on the melons.

It is also the transport hub: Cavaillon has a railway station, which none of the famous Luberon villages do.

The melon

Melon de Cavaillon is a charentais melon — small, round, ribbed, orange-fleshed and intensely perfumed — and the town has been identified with it since the popes at Avignon had them grown here in the fourteenth century.

Alexandre Dumas is the town’s best melon story: in 1864 he offered Cavaillon’s library the complete set of his works — some four hundred volumes — in exchange for an annuity of twelve melons a year. The town agreed, and paid it until he died.

The Fête du Melon in early July is the town’s event of the year. Buy at the morning market rather than a supermarket; the difference is not subtle.

What to see

The Roman arch

A first-century BC arch standing in a square in the middle of town — moved there in 1880 from its original position, and carved with vines and acanthus. Cavaillon was Cabellio, a Roman town on the road between Italy and Spain.

Cathédrale Saint-Véran and its cloister

Twelfth-century Romanesque with later chapels, and beside it a small cloister with carved capitals — quiet, free and almost always empty.

The synagogue

The most unexpected thing in Cavaillon. Under papal rule the Comtat Venaissin was one of the very few places in France where Jews were permitted to live, in four communities known as the carrières — Cavaillon, Carpentras, Avignon and L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.

The synagogue of 1774 survives complete: an eighteenth-century interior in pale blue and gold, more like a Provençal salon than a place of worship, with the bakery for unleavened bread underneath. It is a listed monument and a museum, and it is one of the two oldest surviving synagogues in France — the other is at Carpentras.

Colline Saint-Jacques

The hill above the town, with a Romanesque chapel on top and a path up from the Roman arch. Twenty minutes of climbing gets you the whole Durance valley, the Alpilles and Mont Ventoux.

Getting to Cavaillon

• By train — this is why Cavaillon matters. Regional trains from Avignon in about 20 minutes and from Marseille in an hour. The station is a few minutes from the centre.
• By bus — the road hub for the Luberon: services to Gordes, Roussillon, Bonnieux and Apt leave from the bus station beside the railway station. They are infrequent, so check both directions.
• By car — off the A7. See parking in France.

The market

Monday morning, and it is a real Provençal market rather than a tourist one — produce, cheese, olives, fabric — spread through the streets of the centre. In summer it is where the melons are.

Around Cavaillon

• L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue — 10 km, the antiques capital of Provence, with waterwheels and a Sunday market
• Fontaine-de-Vaucluse — the great karst spring, 20 minutes
• Ménerbes, Bonnieux, Gordes — the Luberon villages, all within half an hour
• Avignon — 20 minutes by train

When to go

July for the melons and the festival. Otherwise spring and autumn, like everywhere in Provence. Cavaillon is the sensible base if you are doing the Luberon without a car — but understand that the villages beyond it still need one.

See Provençal cuisine.

Weather in Cavaillon

Updated: 8 September 2026