193 Best Sights in Provence, France

This is the isolated asylum where van Gogh spent the last year of his life (1889–90). Enter quietly: the hospital shelters psychiatric patients to this day, all of them women. You're free to walk up the beautifully manicured garden path to the church and its jewel-box Romanesque cloister, where the artist found womblike peace.

This shattered Roman ruin dates from the end of the 1st century BC. The temple's function is unknown, though it's thought to have been part of a larger complex that is still unexcavated. In the Middle Ages, Benedictine nuns occupied the building before it was converted into a church. Destruction came during the Wars of Religion.

Directly up Rue de la Calade from Place de la République, are these ruins of a theater built by the Romans under Augustus in the 1st century BC. It's here that the noted Venus of Arles statue, now in the Louvre, was dug up and identified. The theater was once an entertainment venue that held 10,000 people, and is now a pleasant, parklike retreat that's used as a site for the Festival d'Arles, in July and August, and for Les Recontres d'Arles (Photography Festival) from early July to mid-September. Only two columns of the amphitheater's stage walls, one row of arches, and vestiges of the original stone benches remain, as much of the theater's fine local stone was repurposed in early Christian churches.

Orange's spectacular Théâtre Antique, a colossal Roman theater, was built in the time of Caesar Augustus. The vast stone stage wall, bouncing sound off the facing hillside, climbs four stories high—a massive sandstone screen that Louis XIV once referred to as the "finest wall in my kingdom." The niche at center stage contains the original statue of Augustus, just as it reigned over centuries of productions of classical plays. Today the theater provides a backdrop for world-class theater and opera.

Warm natural springs first discovered under the leadership of Sextius, the Thermes now house the glass walls of an ultramodern health spa. The small fountain in the interior marks the warm spring of the original 18th-century establishment. Today, the facility's offerings include a great gym, pressure showers, mud treatments, and underwater massages.

The stout walls and ramparts of this Gothic fortress, once a state-of-the-art marvel, are astonishingly well preserved. The tower is particularly impressive, as are the vistas of the surrounding Camargue. Temporary exhibitions are held along the ramparts in summer; there's also a permanent exhibit on the history of Protestantism in the region.

At the far end of the Jardins de la Fontaine are the remains of a tower the emperor Augustus had built on Gallic foundations; it was probably used as a lookout post. Despite losing 30 feet in height over the course of time, the tower still provides fine views of Nîmes for anyone energetic enough to climb the 140 steps.

Smaller and more picturesque than Beaumes, with stone houses scattered along its gentle slopes, Vacqueyras gives its name to a robust, tannic red wine worthy of its more famous neighbors Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Gigondas. Wine domaines beckon from the outskirts of town, and the center is dotted with plane trees, adorned with cascading wisteria, and punctuated by discreet tasting shops. Thanks to its consistently rising quality, Vacqueyras is one of the latest of the Côtes du Rhônes to earn its own appellation—that is, the right to put its village name on the bottle instead of the less prestigious, more generic Côtes du Rhône label.

This Old Town neighborhood, which you must cross to hike from one Roman monument to the other, carries on peacefully when there's not a blockbuster spectacle in the theater. Lining its broad squares, under heavy-leaved plane trees, are a handful of shops and a few sidewalk cafés.

Within St-Rémy's fast-moving traffic loop, a labyrinth of narrow streets leads you away from the action and into the slow-moving inner sanctum of the Vieille Ville. Here trendy, high-end shops mingle pleasantly with local life, and the buildings, if gentrified, blend in unobtrusively.

Although the fascinating, hivelike structures called bories (shepherds' shelters built with tight-fitting, mortarless stone) are found throughout this region of Provence, this ancient community has about 20 of them. Their origins are provocatively vague—perhaps dating from the eras of the Celts or the Ligurians or even from the Iron Age—and they were inhabited or used for sheep through the 18th century. A photo exhibition shows structures similar to bories in countries around the world. Look for signs to the village just outside Gordes, on a lane heading north from D2.

Held in the wine cellar of her "wine B&B" in the heart of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Danièle Raulet-Reynaud's informative classes (in English) cover everything you'll need to know about this world-class appellation: tasting, buying, storing, serving, and pairing. A master sommelier of France, gastronomic cook, vice president of the Women Vignerons of the Rhône, and a charming raconteur, Raulet-Reynaud has taught wine courses around the world for 40 years. Her popular Apéro Fun (€30) Friday workshops are a wonderful way to spend an hour or an afternoon learning about and tasting these magnificent wines.

Three kilometers (2 miles) north of Bandol via the D559 is this zoo and garden, where cacti and exotic tropical plants grow to remarkable sizes. In a small zoo setting, animals such as flamingos, gibbons, and gazelles frolic in shady gardens.