Refuge d’Art: Walking Tours among Andy Goldsworthy’s Mountain Art in Provence

The 8-day Refuge d’Art hike (€1,590) with two nights spent inside Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures, or the 6-day Chemins d’Art tour (€1,490) based in one country-house hotel. Both begin at Aix-en-Provence TGV station and end with a full day at Château La Coste. Groups of 5 to 10. May and October 2027. A collection of contemporary art unlike any other in the world: There is a stretch of southern France that almost nobody walks. It lies where Provence begins to climb into the Alps: two thousand square kilometres of black marl ridges, beech woods, abandoned hamlets and dry riverbeds, sparsely populated, poorly served by roads, and — for reasons that have everything to do with a handful of stubborn people — home to roughly a hundred works of contemporary art. The story begins in 1994 with an invitation. The Musée Gassendi, in Digne-les-Bains, asked the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to come and work in the mountains above the town — and what began there ended up pushing a small provincial museum out of its own walls. Other artists came too, making work in the landscape itself: permanent, site-specific, unguarded, unlit, unsigned. Thirty years on, carried forward ever since by the museum’s team, that first invitation has produced the Collection d’Art en Montagne: a body of work spread across the Haute-Provence UNESCO Global Geopark with no walls, no opening hours and no queue. The guiding idea comes from the philosopher Pierre Gassendi, born here in 1592, who gave the museum its name and the project its motto: ambulo ergo sum — I walk, therefore I am. The museum means it literally. These works show themselves to people who have walked to them, and to nobody else. Refuge d’Art: Andy Goldsworthy’s most ambitious work Of all the artists who came, the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy stayed longest and went furthest. Over nearly two decades he built Refuge d’Art: a single, continuous work of art that unfolds along 150 kilometres of mountain path. Refuge d’Art is a single piece, and the route through it belongs to the work. It links three monumental dry-stone cairns — the Sentinelles — and a series of ruined shepherds’ huts and roadside chapels that Goldsworthy rebuilt stone by stone, each one housing a single sculpture, each one with a door, a fireplace, a wooden bench, and a key. They are called refuges because that is what they are: you can sleep in them. Two ways to walk it : - The 8-day Andy Goldsworthy Refuge d’Art hike, day by day: The full immersion: five of Andy Goldsworthy’s Refuges d’Art, all three Sentinelles, and two nights spent sleeping inside his sculptures. -The 6-day hotel-based Andy Goldsworthy tour, day by day: Four of Andy Goldsworthy’s Refuges d’Art, a Sentinelle, and a hot bath every evening. For further information and the full schedule: https://www.lucrichard.fr/refuge-art-andy-goldsworthy-walking-tour-provence/ WhatsApp : 06 08 16 66 44 (Luc)