Cotignac is a village in the Provence verte set against an eighty-metre cliff of tufa, riddled with caves and cave dwellings and crowned by two towers. Its main square, shaded by plane trees, holds a market on Tuesday mornings, and the surrounding hills carry well-regarded wine estates. This is inland Var at its best.
It is the first thing you see, and it resembles no other Provençal village. Cotignac is built at the foot of a wall of tufa, the porous limestone laid down by an ancient waterfall, eighty metres high and four hundred wide. The rock is riddled with natural cavities that the inhabitants adapted over the centuries: granaries, sheepfolds, refuges, dwellings, cut stairways, a whole vertical village above the village.
You can climb into the cave dwellings by a stairway from the centre and work through several levels of galleries and rooms hollowed out of the stone. At the top, the remains of two medieval towers are a reminder that the cliff also served as a fortress. The view carries over the rooftops and the hills.
Below, everything revolves around the cours Gambetta, a long square lined with century-old plane trees, fountains and terraces. It is one of the finest squares in Provence at village scale, and you will happily spend an hour there doing nothing.
Around it, narrow lanes, tall houses with ochre façades, the sixteenth-century church of Saint-Pierre, an open-air theatre and an olive mill. The Tuesday morning market is among the best regarded in inland Var, and the village fills without becoming unbearable.
Cotignac is also a place of pilgrimage, which explains part of its activity. Notre-Dame de Grâces, on a hill just outside the village, is the shrine where Anne of Austria came in 1638 to pray for the birth of Louis XIV, and where John Paul II came in 1984. The place is quiet, the view fine, and people come as much for one as for the other.
The monastery of Saint-Joseph du Bessillon, a little further on, is the only shrine in the world dedicated to an apparition of Saint Joseph, in 1660.
Cotignac lies within the Côtes de Provence appellation, and the estates in the surrounding hills are among the most interesting in inland Var, where altitude and cool nights produce wines with more tension than those on the coast. Several cellars are open all year, a few minutes from the village.
Cotignac sits at the centre of the Provence verte, and makes a good base for a day: Le Thoronet Abbey thirty minutes away, the lake of Carcès, the Sillans waterfall, Entrecasteaux and its château. This is a Var without the sea, wooded and agricultural, where prices and crowds bear no relation to the coast.
This guide is part of the address book of a private estate in Puget-sur-Argens, 60 minutes away, available for weddings and family stays. It is not open to visitors.
Discover the estate →
