Moulin Daudet (Fontvieille)

The Moulin Daudet at Fontvieille, about 5 kilometres south of Les Baux, is a 16th-century windmill associated with the writer Alphonse Daudet, whose collection "Lettres de mon moulin" supposedly originated here. The mill sits on a rise with good views over the Alpilles plain and the village of Fontvieille below.

The mill itself is a museum open to visitors, with exhibits on Daudet and the windmill tradition of the region. It's a gentle excursion from Les Baux, especially combined with a walk through the olive groves and the village of Fontvieille, which has a Saturday market and several good restaurants.

things to do sight
A story
Alphonse Daudet's "Lettres de mon moulin" (Letters from My Windmill), published in 1869, was supposedly written from this windmill — though scholars have established that Daudet used the mill as a backdrop and actually wrote the stories in Paris. The book nonetheless made the mill famous across France, and it has been a literary pilgrimage site since the late 19th century. Daudet himself admitted the deception was partly a literary conceit, but the setting is genuine enough that the fiction sticks.

Other places in Things to Do