Le Poët-Laval

On a steep site in the Jabron valley, this medieval village with a triangular plan sits in a superb panorama of wooded foothills. Its architectural ensemble of severe sobriety consists, among other things, of the remains of an imposing castle that was, at the time of the Crusades, a residence of the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem. The village was built mostly more than 800 years ago by the Hospitallers and fortified to serve as a stage and refuge for pilgrims leaving for the Holy Land. Built in the twelfth century then remodelled in the thirteenth and fifteenth, the village castle was ransacked and largely dismantled at the Revolution. But its keep with its single-pitch roof has remained more or less intact: on the upper floors a dovecote survives, fitted in a quadrangular room. Near the castle, the chapel of Saint-Jean des Commandeurs, dated twelfth century, has kept of its origins only the bell tower and the Romanesque apse.

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