🇫🇷 France · South (Provence and the French Riviera)
Avignon is one of those cities where you feel history in the stone. For almost seventy years in the 14th century, this city on the banks of the Rhône was the capital of Christendom: the popes lived here, and here they raised the Palais des Papes, the largest Gothic fortress in Europe, an imposing mass that still dominates the old town. Ringed by intact medieval walls, with its famous bridge reaching out into the river and its Provençal atmosphere, Avignon is both an open-air museum and a living city.
But Avignon is also the best gateway to Provence, that region of golden light that captivated Van Gogh and Cézanne. A step away are the hilltop villages of the Luberon —Gordes on its crag, Roussillon with its cliffs of red ochre— the quarries of Les Baux, the lavender fields that in high summer turn the Valensole and Sault plateaus violet, and the Pont du Gard, the most spectacular surviving Roman aqueduct. Every July, on top of that, the city is transformed by the Festival d'Avignon, one of the great theatre events in the world.
This guide covers Avignon and its Provence with a practical eye: how to visit the Palais des Papes and the bridge, when and where to actually see lavender (it does not bloom all year, nor everywhere at the same time), how to get around villages where a car is almost obligatory, and how to make the most of a region that combines history, landscape, food and art like few others.
The history of Avignon is marked by an extraordinary episode: between 1309 and 1377, the city was the seat of the papacy. Fleeing the instability of Rome and under the influence of the French monarchy, Pope Clement V moved the papal court to Avignon, and seven popes lived there over almost seventy years, in what became known as the 'Avignon papacy' or, in critical terms, the 'Babylonian captivity'. The popes raised the colossal Palais des Papes and turned the small Provençal city into the capital of Western Christendom. When the papacy returned to Rome in 1377, the conflict over the succession set off the Western Schism (1378-1417), during which antipopes went on living in Avignon. The city and its district (the Comtat Venaissin) remained part of the Papal States until the French Revolution, when in 1791 they were incorporated into France. Its medieval walls, the Palais des Papes and the Pont Saint-Bénézet are today a World Heritage Site. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Mediterranean south: Greek Marseille, the Roman Province, the popes of Avignon, the crusade against the Cathars of Carcassonne and the invention of the French Riviera, from Nice to Cannes.
Read the history of South (Provence and the French Riviera) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the popes turned it into the capital of Christendom, Avignon was already a settlement inhabited since remote times. Its name comes from 'Avennio', the town of the Celto-Ligurian tribe of the Cavares, who settled on the rocky crag (today's Rocher des Doms) overlooking the river Rhône. The position could not have been better: a defensive rock beside a great navigable river, at a natural crossroads between the Mediterranean and inland Gaul.
With the Roman conquest of the region, Avignon was absorbed into Gallia Narbonensis, the prosperous Roman province of the south that the Romans regarded almost as an extension of Italy. This whole area —today's Provence— owes its name precisely to having been the Roman 'Provincia' par excellence ('Provincia Romana'), and it filled with towns, roads, theatres, amphitheatres and aqueducts, many of which still survive. Not far from Avignon, the Romans raised engineering masterpieces such as the Pont du Gard, the aqueduct that carried water to Nîmes, or the monuments of Arles and Orange.
For centuries, Avignon was a medium-sized Roman town on the banks of the Rhône. After the fall of the Empire, the region passed through the hands of different peoples —Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, and it suffered Saracen raids— and Avignon went through periods of decline and recovery. In the Middle Ages it was part of various political entities and became a commune with a degree of autonomy, until it came into the orbit of the counts of Provence and of Toulouse. Nothing yet suggested the extraordinary role the city was about to play.
The event that changed Avignon's fate forever came at the beginning of the 14th century. In the early 1300s, the city of Rome was an unsafe and turbulent place: fighting between noble families, violence and instability made governing the Church very difficult. In that context, and under the strong influence of the French monarchy, Pope Clement V —a Frenchman, a former archbishop of Bordeaux— decided in 1309 not to settle in Rome and to establish the papal court in the south of France. Shortly afterwards, the seat was fixed at Avignon.
So began the 'Avignon papacy', which would last almost seventy years, from 1309 to 1377, and during which seven popes followed one another, all of them French: Clement V, John XXII, Benedict XII, Clement VI, Innocent VI, Urban V and Gregory XI. Avignon became the centre of the Western Christian world: embassies, pilgrims, bankers, artists and clergy from all over Europe converged on it. The small Provençal city grew dizzyingly, filled with palaces and people, and accumulated immense wealth.
The symbol of that splendour is the Palais des Papes, raised above all between 1335 and 1352 by the popes Benedict XII and Clement VI: a colossal palace-fortress, the largest Gothic building in Europe, half defensive castle, half sumptuous residence. Around it the great walls that still surround the old town were built. Not everyone approved of the move: the poet Petrarch, who lived in the area, harshly criticised the luxurious, worldly life of the papal court and called that period the Church's 'Babylonian captivity', comparing it to the exile of the Jewish people. The phrase caught on and is still used for this era.
In 1377, Pope Gregory XI finally decided to return the papal seat to Rome, bringing the Avignon papacy to an end. But his death, shortly afterwards, set off one of the greatest crises in the history of the Church. In 1378, part of the clergy elected a pope in Rome (Urban VI) and another part, dissatisfied, elected a rival pope who once again settled in Avignon. So began the Western Schism (1378-1417), during which Christendom was split between two —and at times three— simultaneous popes, each with supporters among the kingdoms of Europe.
Avignon once again became the seat of a rival papal court, that of the so-called Avignon 'antipopes', among them Clement VII and, above all, Benedict XIII, the Aragonese Pedro de Luna, who held out stubbornly in the Palais des Papes even when almost all of Europe had withdrawn its support, until he was besieged and had to flee at the beginning of the 15th century. The Schism was finally resolved at the Council of Constance (1414-1418), which deposed the rival popes and elected a single one, reuniting the Church with its seat in Rome.
Even though the popes no longer lived there, Avignon did not return to France. The city and the surrounding district, the Comtat Venaissin, went on belonging to the Papal States, that is, to the pope's direct rule, for more than four centuries. Governed by papal legates and vice-legates, Avignon was a curious enclave of the Church inside the kingdom of France, with its own administration and a cosmopolitan atmosphere. That singular situation only ended with the French Revolution: in 1791, after votes and no little tension, Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin were annexed to France, of which they have been part ever since.
Beyond Avignon's papal history, the region around it —Provence— has an extremely powerful cultural identity. It is a land of intense, clear light, of hills covered with olive trees, vines, cypresses and lavender fields, of stone villages perched on crags and of a Mediterranean way of life that has fascinated travellers and artists for generations. The mistral, the strong north wind that sweeps the Rhône valley, is also part of the region's character.
In the 19th century, Provence lived through a revival of its own language and culture, Provençal Occitan, driven by the Félibrige movement and by its leading figure, the poet Frédéric Mistral, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904 and devoted his life to preserving the Provençal language and traditions. In those same years, the light of Provence drew some of the greatest painters in history. Vincent van Gogh painted some of his most famous works in Arles and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, dazzled by the colours and the light of the south; Paul Cézanne, born in nearby Aix-en-Provence, painted the Sainte-Victoire mountain again and again.
The lavender fields, which bloom violet between June and July on plateaus such as Valensole and Sault, became over time the iconic image of Provence, although their intensive cultivation is relatively recent. The region is also famous for its food —olive oil, herbs, the wines of Côtes du Rhône and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Cavaillon melon— and for its colourful markets. All that cultural and scenic richness is what makes Avignon much more than a monumental city: the gateway to one of the best-loved regions in France.
Contemporary Avignon lives, to a large extent, off its extraordinary historical legacy. In 1995, the city's historic centre —the Palais des Papes, the episcopal ensemble, the Pont Saint-Bénézet and the medieval walls— was inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage list, in recognition of its exceptional value as a witness to Avignon's role as the capital of Christendom in the 14th century and as a remarkable example of Gothic architecture.
But Avignon is not just a museum of stone. Since 1947, when the theatre director Jean Vilar organised a 'week of dramatic art' in the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes, the city has become one of the world capitals of theatre. The Festival d'Avignon, held every July, is today one of the most important and prestigious performing arts events on the planet, with the wall and the palace courtyard as a legendary stage. Around it grew the gigantic 'OFF' festival, which fills the city with hundreds of companies and shows. For a few weeks, Avignon is completely transformed: every square, church and courtyard becomes a theatre.
The rest of the year, Avignon is a lively, pleasant Provençal city, with its university, its markets, its terraces on the Place de l'Horloge and its role as the tourist capital of the region. Well connected by TGV with Paris, Lyon and Marseille, it works as an ideal base for discovering Provence: the Luberon villages, the lavender fields, the Pont du Gard, Arles and Nîmes. Few cities pack in as many layers of history as Avignon —Roman, medieval, papal— along with so much present-day cultural vitality, all within its golden walls on the banks of the Rhône.