Abbaye Notre-Dame de Senanque, Gordes

Quite an interesting history of the Abbey. Tours of the abbey are only in French, but it's still worth it to be able to take the tour. It lasts about 45 minutes in total. Visiting the outside of the abbey is free.

Whilst it says "accessible entrance", that's about the limit of what is accessible with wheels. You can't access any of the bits you'd actually want to see if you're in a wheelchair or have kids that need a pushchair. This should really be a bit clearer - whilst old buildings often have accessibility challenges due to their historical nature, the visitable parts of the abbey are up an entire flight of stairs and to get between the various parts of the tour it requires going up and down maybe a dozen steps at a time (if it had been a handful of steps you could have carried a buggy). Anyway, not to complain about the structure itself - just that this needs to be made much clearer: don't go there if you need wheels or find stairs problematic. On a positive point, the histopad was genuinely very interesting and clever - it even allowed us to see what the inside of the church would look like if it wasn't currently a building site. It's interesting to see it as a building site, but again, it would have been nice to have a heads up that the entire outside of the building is covered in scaffolding (so no nice photos of the lavender and abbey) and the inside of the church is a building site - although the dormitory, cloisters and underground rooms are all in good shape, and the cloister garden was beautiful. I would love to come again once the building work is finished and when my baby is a bit older and can walk herself rather than needing to be carried around. It really does look like it would be a lovely place and I did get a bit of a feel for that today - just would have been good to know about the accessibility and building works in advance, as we might have postponed the visit.