The ochre village
Roussillon
A Provençal hill village built on, and painted with, cliffs of red, orange and yellow ochre.
Why Roussillon is red ochre
Roussillon stands in the Luberon hills of Provence on one of the largest ochre deposits in Europe. Ochre is clay coloured by iron oxide. Here it runs from pale yellow through orange to deep red, all within one cliff. From the late 18th century it was quarried, washed and sold as pigment for paints, plaster and even rubber, and the trade peaked in the early 20th century. Synthetic colours then replaced it. The village houses are plastered in the same earth, so each front is a slightly different shade of the cliff. A marked path leads through the old quarries among pines, and a former factory nearby now teaches how the pigment was made.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Roussillon
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Roussillon, Vaucluse" on Wikipedia. If you know Roussillon and we have it wrong, tell us.
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The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Varanasi In: Marcin Białek, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Nagpur In: Gppande, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Luang Prabang La: Shelly Zohar, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Colmar Fr: --sinava--, CC BY 2.0, source
- Menton Fr: Jpgross, Public domain, source
- Toulouse Fr: Tonio94 ( talk · contribs ), CC BY-SA 2.5, source