Provence Trip June/July 2023 - Part 7 Glanum, St Remy de Provence

There is a downside to having a Moho and that's not being able to park easily. Before we go anywhere I look on google maps for car parks and then look on street view to see if there is a height barrier (something you don't notice when you travel in a car). There is a lovely coastal town called Cassis that I've been wanting to visit for several years, but when we got there, the only parking I had found that seemed feasible was closed. And it had a barrier that I hadn't seen on street view anyway! So there was only one thing to do, and that was to keep on driving. I kept getting glimpses of multicoloured buildings beside the port and amazing cliffs with a castle below, but unless we find that there are any buses running there that we can park near, we sadly won't be visiting. 

So on we went to a place that had its own car park. These are the remains of a Roman town near St Remy de Provence known as Glanum. Nearby are two well preserved monuments known as 'les Antiques' from the 1st century BC. Below, the mausoleum of the Julii, dating from about 40BC.

And this monument is a triumphal arch.

Amazing stone carvings on the underneath of the arch.

The town itself is built around a sacred spring and was inhabited by the Salyens between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC, later falling to the Romans. The original town was destroyed and later rebuilt several times, during a period of on and off warfaring between the Salyens, the Greeks in nearby Marseille, and the Romans. Most of the remains excavated here are from the Roman era of the 1st century BC to 1st century AD.

Glanum was destroyed by Germanic tribes in 260AD and abandoned, with many of the stones being used to build nearby St Remy de Provence. The town became covered in deep soil over the centuries until excavations began in 1921.

The House of the Antae, a Hellenistic-style residence with a peristyle (columns surrounding internal courtyard) of Tuscan columns and a basin to capture rainwater.

Keith stealing a bit of Roman pottery! 😁

In the temple of Cybele there was an altar dedicated to the priestess Loreia, with a stone carving of the ears of the goddess, that she might hear prayers.

Restored columns of twin Corinthian temples in the first Roman Forum of Glanum (20 BC).

Below, in the middle where the two columns are, is the remains of the Temple of Valetudo, about 39 BC.

We had wanted to visit St Remy de Provence afterwards, but it was so hot that we were really weary by now so opted to just go to our campsite and chill out. It's such a shame when it's too hot as we end up missing out on doing things. We were lucky though that the real heat didn't appear until the last few days of our holiday.

On our way home we stopped at a motorway services which has views of the medieval Cité of Carcassonne.

The sunflowers were in full bloom so I took some photos with my phone as we drove the last ten minutes home after leaving the motorway.

Nearly home - our village up on the hill. Our house is off to the left out of the picture, although we can see it from here and from much further away, in fact.

And that, my friends, concludes our Provence trip last summer! Keith and I are planning to go back in September to see more of the mountainous areas in northern Provence, with, I'm sure, a few days at the big campsite by the beach again!