The Hinterland

Go up first, and go early. Gourdon hangs seven hundred and sixty metres above the valley of the Loup, a fortified village of fewer than five hundred souls, and at nine in the morning its terraces hold the entire bay of Cannes in one glance — with, on the clearest days, a silver suggestion of the sea a hundred kilometres west.

Walk it in twenty minutes, then have coffee on the edge of the drop. The honey-makers and herbalists open slowly; so should you.

From Gourdon the road descends into a different world: the Loup has cut a six-kilometre slot through the limestone, four hundred metres deep in places, and the D6 threads the bottom of it under a ceiling of green. Stop at the Cascade de Courmes, where the river drops forty metres into a bowl of polished rock — in summer, the brave swim beneath it.

This is the hinterland’s real argument: ten minutes from lavender-soap country, a landscape with nothing to sell you.

Back in the light, Tourrettes-sur-Loup stands on its spur with its fourteenth-century houses forming the ramparts themselves. It has been the capital of the perfumed violet since the 1930s; out of season, the village keeps a workshop quiet that the summer coast has lost entirely — potters, a chocolatier who candies the violets, lanes that end in views.

Lunch here, on a terrace over the valley. Nobody hurries you, because nobody hurries.

If the day still has room, drive east to Peillon — a village in the shape of a ship’s prow, unchanged since the fifteenth century, cars left below, silence included. It is the hinterland distilled: one chapel with five-hundred-year-old frescoes, one square, one fountain, and the certainty of having stepped briefly out of the century.

Then home, downhill all the way, to the sea and dinner in the old town. The hinterland is not a trip. It is the other half of where you are staying.