Plan-de-la-Tour

We last visited here on a Thursday mid-morning in early March, and the place was decidely "quiet". It's an attractive little town, though, in its quiet way. The houses and buildings in the town are all well-kept and most are nicely painted in the colorful Provençal pastels and ocres.

The town is rather spread out, without a clearly defined center. Or rather, there are two or three centers. The town map shows a tight group of old streets surrounding the "Eglise" and the "Ancien Presbytère", but it's not so obvious when you're wander around on a discovery walk. There are many modern houses growing now from the village, but the center is still "authentic", including a 16th-century tower and vaulted passages. There are also a number of ruined mills nearby

Wandering the narrow streets around the center of the town we didn't find any sites really outstanding, but there are enough little nooks, pretty doorways and other little sites to make a short stroll interesting. A line of low hills form a backdrop to the northeast of town, quite pretty when there's a deep blue sky behind them.

We found only a couple of cafés open on a sunny weekday in the winter. Both were on the "basic" side, small, noisy and smokey, but of course the service was fast and polite and the clientel were talkative and friendly.

No supermarkets in sight (thank goodness), but Plan-de-la-Tour does have all the necessary shops, such as butcher, baker, groceries, hair dressing and everything else needed to support the inhabitants and the visitors. We also visited a shop claiming to have 'a bit of everything' (named appropriately Un Peu de Tout), and it really did. Inside the aisles were narrow and the shelves were high, and packed with anything and everything you could imagine, from household, to hardware, to sports, toys, gifts and things we couldn't identify.

There's a second little "old village" about a 10-minute walk north of the town center. From the top of the main street (Ave Général Leclerc), turn right in front of the old "Foyer des Campagnes" building and go out the Bvd Maréchal Joffre, which is also the D44 in the direction of Le Muy. When you get to the edge of town, where the little stream "Ruisseau d'Emponse" crosses the road, you'll find a collection of old houses and tiny little streets clustered tightly together.

The village is located in an oasis of cleared farms and vineyards in the midst of the Maures forests of pine, pubescent oak, cork oak and olive trees. Corks from the numerous cork oaks are one of the local products - along with Côte de Provence wines, olives, red and yellow marble and pewter. Color is added in the first few months of the year with mimosa growing thickly, in peoples gardens, on the hillsides along the northwest part of town and along the roads and lanes nearby. On the D44 towards Le Muy, just a few kilometers from Plan-de-la-Tour we saw forests of the bright yellow shrubs. Just east of town, where the D74 heads out across the farmlands towards Sainte Maxime, there's a forest of umbrella pine (pin parasole).