The Devès

5 points of interest

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  Patrimony and history

  Nyons, gateway to the Baronnies

  Located between the Vaux Mountain the north and the Eygues banks to the south, contiguous to the clue (rocky around a watercourse), the town of Nyons is the gateway to the Baronnies Provencal massif by the Eygues valley. From the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, its bridge was the only structure, upstream of Orange, to allow the crossing of the river in any season. The city becomes the point of passage for the commercial and military routes.

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  Panorama

  The city of Nyons from Devès

  In the center of the old town of Nyons, the church and the monastery Saint-Césaire are located on a site certainly occupied since antiquity. Above, the Forts district, with its thirteenth-century towers and its walls, is a secular neighbourhood. To the east and west, the city then developed around the Place des Arcades and a street that led to the Alps. The city remained in the walls until the eighteenth and it was not until the twentieth century that it spread in the lowland.

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  Flora

  Three types of juniper on Devès!

  The Devès vegetation, on its slope oriented to the south west very exposed to the sun, is particularly adapted to the hot and dry conditions: it's the scrubland. Several varieties of juniper (G. commun, G. cade, G. of Phenicia) have colonized this stony and filtering soil, where oaks and pines can not plant their roots. Their tiny leaves (thorns) and their small size are all strategies developed to limit their needs (and losses) in water.

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  Patrimony and history

  The Notre-Dame de Réparat Chapel

  The Notre-Dame de Réparat chapel, built at the top of Devès, owes its name to the site that surrounds it, called "la Roche" (rupis in Latin). This district is formerly occupied: its inhabitants took advantage of its belvedere location, between the plain to the west and the Baronnies mountains to the east. Already mentioned in the thirteenth century, it was associated with a hermitage but in the nineteenth century, it is abandoned and falls into ruin. The hermitage was restored about twenty years ago.

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  Patrimony and history

  The Pontias, the vintage wind

  On the city of Nyons and on its heights blows a wind typical of the micro-climate the Pontias. This northern wind is credited with keeping the Nyonsais air fresh and dry. The Pontias legend tells that it appeared when Césaire, bishop of Arles at the beginning of the 6th century, threw his glove against a rock in which he had previously captured a breeze by the sea. Where the glove touched the rock, the earth opened and the wind gushed out, creating the "Pontias hole".