A visit to St. Paul de Vence - Part 1

A visit to St. Paul de Vence - Part 1

I have been lucky enough to have a job that requires me to spend a month on the French Rivera for part of the early summer. As you can imagine this has let me explore most of the surrounding countryside in my time off. So I thought that I would write a series of articles about the places that I thought were worth someone else going to see.

There are many hill top villages all over the Riviera, but St Paul de Vence is possibly the most famous and the most chic. The village itself is one of the most intact medieval examples of the region, with most of the ramparts still there. . The medieval fortified village is perched on a narrow spur between two deep valleys, the top of this large mound is known as the Plateau du Puy.
Its natural location started as a Roman oppidum and it then became a medieval castle in the Middle Ages, which was controlled by the Counts of Provence.

The village was fortified in the 13th century due to its proximity to the Var River when the County of Nice was ceded to the Kingdom of Savoy. The entrance was erected in the 1400s, and features a canon muzzle that was a trophy from the 1544 Battle of Cerisoles in Italy.

In the 16th century, St. Paul was ruled by the Lords of Grasse-Bar, and then became a Royal Village. In 1537, King François the First built a second wall to completely enclose the village because of attacks from Charles V of Spain and his Habsburg dynasty. These are the immense city walls and fortifications that still stand today. Building these walls meant that several hundred houses had to be knocked down. All the inhabitants were moved down to the lower lands on the approach to the town which is where La Colle is now located.

In the following centuries, the village developed its Baroque religious architecture and in the 19th century, the artists started to arrive, attracted by the light and the amazing architecture of the village. One of the local hotel entrepreneurs was Paul Roux, he was the owner of what would later become the Colombe d’Or Hotel, more of this later. It was located outside the walls right at the entrance to the village. He decided to offer lodgings to some artists for free in exchange for some of their paintings, which still adorn the hotel today.

Now that I have dealt with the history of this village we can move on to what you can actually see in the 2nd part of the article.