Provence Region of France: Avignon

A few weeks back my wife and I had the pleasure of visiting the Provence region of France and the historic city of Avignon. The city is located along the left Bank of the Rhone River in the Southern part of the country and is a really good spot to use as a home base to explore the surrounding area.

We spent three nights there and were able to see quite a few different and unique locations. I'll talk more about them later in my upcoming posts. For now I'll just focus on the city of Avignon. The photo above is the view of town from our hotel room. It shows the old city ramparts and the Pope's Palace off in the distance.

The town of Avignon became a UNESCO World Heritage site back in 1995 and has several monuments scattered throughout the city.

The most famous among them is probably Palais des Papes, which as it's name implies is a large palace fortress where the Pope resided for hundreds of years throughout history.

Because of it's strong ties to Christianity, the town is sometimes refered to as the "Capital of the Christian world" of the middle ages.

The Palais des Papes is located in the heart of the old town in front of a large square that is surrounded by restaurants, the old mint building and a museum.

Just off to one side is the cathedral and a beautiful garden park with seating next to a fountain that contains ducks and swans. The garden is free to enter which is always nice.

It sits high up on a cliff and has some really incredible views overlooking the river below and various parts of the city.

Another unique part of Avignon is the fact that its surrounded by a large lengthy medeival wall called a ramparts. Ramparts are actually fairly common in old French towns but this one is certainly among the largest that we have seen in the country. I thought that Carcassone's wall was lengthy but this one definitely out does it.

The wall is approximately 8m tall and holds 85 towers of varying sizes. It was pretty impressive that such a large city could be completely surrounded by a wall.

Within the walls is a mix of residential and commercial buildings, some of which were quite old and some which were more modern. We spent all of our time in Avignon touring the city within the walls.

We spent out time looking at the shops, eating at the restaurants and cafes, having drinks at a few bars and patio terraces, looking in the bakery windows,and touring around viewing the quaint little homes. Basically everything you would want to do as as was tourist can be found within the old city walls.

Some areas were a bit run down looking as expected of any major city, but most areas that we happened to explore were quite nice overall.

At night we took a walk to the other side of the river to get a photo of the ancient medeival bridge - Pont d'Avignon. You can walk on the bridge if you'd like but there's a fee associated with it. At 11€ per person I didn't think it was worth it myself. To be honest, it seemed way too expensive for what it was, especially since there are so many other panoramic lookout points scattered throughout the area.

The dog was getting pretty tired by that point, even despite having received a mid day foot massage. It was time to head back to the hotel. Tomorrow was a new day with new sites to see.

That's it for now. The next stop will be the hilltop town of Gordes.

Until then, thanks for reading!