The Sorgue: from the waterwheel to the source

In Les Taillades

It starts at the end of the path

Before we go any further, a quick word about what we can see here. In Les Taillades, the Saint-Pierre Mill was built in 1859. It was originally a madder mill — the root from which the red dye for the French army’s trousers was extracted, and which made the Vaucluse’s fortune in the 19th^e century — before becoming a flour mill.

Its wheel counts 24 blades, making it one of the largest water mills in the Vaucluse. It is not the River Sorgue that powers it, but the Carpentras Canal, which runs through the town and offers some very pretty walking paths leading towards the Badarel Gorges.

The Friday market

On Friday evenings, the mill hosts its market: local producers and craftspeople set up their stalls in Place Saint-Pierre au Moulin, from 5 pm to 8 pm, from April to the end of October. Cheese, vegetables, bread, wine from the valley: it’s the best place to stock up during your stay, and it’s within walking distance of the holiday cottages.

A favourite tourist spot

L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, the town of seventy wheels

To the south of the town, along the Moulin Vert Canal, the Gautier Castle is a town house built in 1885 on a square plan, set in the middle of a park that bears its name. Pierre Gautier, who stayed there, bequeathed it to the town.

The water of the Sorgue provided the driving force for all the town’s craft industries: as early as the 12th^e In the [century], mills are mentioned in historical records; in the following century, the cloth-making industry emerged; then came paper mills, silk mills and dye works. The town once had as many as seventy wheels along its canals. Today, there are still around fifteen of them, covered in moss, which continue to turn as the current flows.

In other words: this city functioned for seven centuries on a 100 % renewable industry. It took us a while to get back to that.

A favourite tourist spot

Fontaine-de-Vaucluse

We continue upwards and reach the end: the chasm. The source of the Sorgue is the largest resurgence in Europe and the fifth largest in the world. It drains an underground catchment area stretching from the south of Mont Ventoux to the Vaucluse mountains and the Montagne de Lure: all the rain that falls across this region resurfaces here, at the foot of a cliff over 240 metres high.

Why come now?

Spectacular floods occur in the spring and In autumn, the chasm can spout up to 90 cubic metres per second. In the height of summer, the pool is often calm and the water flows out from below. A word of advice: ring the tourist office the day before to find out what the water level is like – it’s well worth a visit.

The village owes its name to its geographical location: Vallis Clausa, the enclosed valley that gave rise to Vaucluse — the only department in France to owe its name to a geological feature. Petrarch wrote part of his work there, and Boccaccio, Chateaubriand, Mistral and René Char followed in his footsteps.

The Great History of the Number

A hundred years to hit rock bottom

This chasm has posed a challenge to mankind for over a century. We knew where the water was coming out; nobody knew where it was coming from. So we went down to have a look.

• 1878 Nello Ottonelli, a diver, descended to –23 m. The first serious attempt.
• 1938 The diver Négri reached a depth of –28 m.
• 1946 Cousteau and Dumas descended to –46 metres using the scuba gear they had just invented. The air in their cylinders had gone off: they resurfaced on the verge of fainting.
• 1967 Albert Falco reached –90 m; that same year, the remote-controlled craft Internet user reaches a depth of –106 m.
• 1981-83 Jochen Hasenmayer, on a free dive, descended to –143 m and then to –205 m.
• 2 August 1985 Endgame: the robot Modexa It was discovered after three hours of exploration on a sandy seabed, at a depth of –315 m.

When you’re standing at the edge of the basin, just imagine that beneath your feet lies a vertical shaft as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and that it took one hundred and seven years and a good ten expeditions to reach the bottom.

At our place

The move from the shops to the Bel-Air holiday cottages

Since we’re talking about things you don’t see at first glance: here too, you have to look up. The shops painted on our walls are full of detail. There’s a real art to «disguising» an unsightly patch of plaster with a swallow’s nest. The shop owners’ names were chosen around a table, following debates worthy of Pagnol’s dialogue: not to name names, Serge, Pierre and Jean-Claude.

Leather straps have been attached to the wall, and cans of solexine and petrol have been placed on the floor in the foreground to add depth to the trompe-l’œil. Five years on, the petrol pump, the shop selling new and second-hand tyres, and the «Gilbert Piston» motorbike shop haven’t aged a bit.