Avignon Travel Guide
Discover the secret gems in this beautiful French town ... places to eat, drink, listen to music and watch the world go by
Hello lovely readers and welcome to this special newsletter all about Avignon, a gorgeous French town where I’ve just spent the past month. The places I’ve recommended below are all tried and tested by me and it’s a long post. And because this type of guide takes ages to pull together, I’m sharing it exclusively with subscribers who support my work directly with a small monthly payment. I hope you understand. If you’d like to access this newsletter, and my full archive, you can join my growing community for less than a pound a week for a yearly subscription. Just click the button below. Warm wishes. XX
I’ve just returned from a month in Avignon, a very beautiful medieval town in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of southeastern France. Lucky cow, I hear you say? Absolutely true. But it’s something I’ve longed to do and planned to do for years: to spend longer in a lovely place than I normally would do on holidays, so I could lean into it and get to know it slowly.
My plan was to divide the month between work and play, and it worked out brilliantly. I did some book edits and research in the mornings, knuckled down to writing in the afternoons, and I punctuated the middle of the day French-style with a proper lunch break. (Yes, they really still do enjoy a decent lunch away from the desk). I took myself off to cafes and restaurants, museums and markets, got lost in the cobbled laneways, lingered in cool churches and licked ice creams to the backdrop of burbling fountains. I also got a heap of work done and my grown-up children and their pals joined my husband and I at various points throughout the month. It’s definitely the way forward if we can manage it.
The following guide to Avignon is anything but exhaustive - I’m simply sharing the places that were special to me. It’s impossible, of course, to avoid other tourists, but some of them really aren’t on the tourist radar.