Roussillon

Roussillon takes half a day to see: the Sentier des Ocres, a trail through former open-pit ochre quarries with up to 17 different shades of red, orange and yellow, and the village itself, with its houses painted in those same colors, are the reason to visit. April-October is best. It's mid-to-high priced by French standards. For over a century it was one of the world's leading centers of ochre pigment extraction, until synthetic pigment production closed the last quarry in the 1930s, and today the landscape left by that mining is preserved as a tourist attraction.