A North American type of suburbia, just does not seem to exist in Provence. In the centre of Aix en Provence, the buildings and the streets clearly seem to have been built a thousand or more years in the past, then, as one leaves the centre behind, there are wider, modern roads, lined, mostly, by apartment buildings. Of the villages which we had visited in various parts of Provence, there might be a handful of more modern buildings on the outskirts, but unlike in North America, they do not form the sort of bedroom communities which one finds here, in N. America.

The villages we visited, or had travelled through were communities that had existed for centuries, even millenia.