Les Baux-de-Provence
Tourism

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parking is available outside the entrance to the Lower Town.

This elevated site was settled as long ago as the Early Stone Age. The first signs of overlords in Les Baux are found around the year 950. In the 12th and 13th C. Les Baux (Provençal Li Baus = The Rocks) was the chief town of a county which embraced a great part of Provence and numbered more than 3,000 inhabitants. The Cour d'Amour, the rendezvous of the troubadours in the 13th C., was famous as the center of courtly poetry which was later to find a parallel in German- speaking countries in the Minnesang. Being a stronghold of Huguenots - there still exists a window from the former Protestant church of 1571 with the watchword "post tenebras lux", or "after the dark comes light" - and a refuge for rebels from Aix, in 1631 Louis XIII ordered the Duke of Guise to lay siege to the town and take it. The inhabitants longed for peace, and asked the king to take over the whole town and to tear down the fortifications at their expense, which was done two years later. In 1642 Les Baux was given as a gift to the Grimaldi family, who remained Dukes of Les Baux until 1791, when they were dispossessed during a revolution. Charles Maxime de Grimaldi, who died in 1880, was the last to hold the title of Marquis des Baux.

At the beginning of the Industrial Age another aspect quickly became important. In the surrounding countryside in 1821 rich deposits of a mineral were discovered which provides the main basic material for aluminum production, and which was named "bauxite" after the town.