---
title: "Tourrettes-sur-Loup, by an editor who lives thirty minutes away."
date: 2026-05-10T14:42:42.885Z
updated: 2026-05-10T14:49:19Z
category: destinations
read_time_minutes: 9
word_count: 1898
tags: ["Tourrettes-sur-Loup", "Vence", "Valbonne", "Côte d'Azur", "Alpes-Maritimes", "Provence", "Year-round; shoulder weeks (May, September, October) are the editorial answer; violets bloom in March"]
canonical_url: https://afo.re/journal/tourrettes-sur-loup
source: Le Journal · Afore
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---

# Tourrettes-sur-Loup, by an editor who lives thirty minutes away.

*The perched village above Vence — what to buy, where to eat, when to come.*

![Tourrettes-sur-Loup seen from across the valley — the medieval village perched on a long ridge of stone, beige limestone built into the rock with a drop into the scrub-oak greenery below and the lower hills above Vence behind it.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/3xxwvlfm/production/c3b1f8ad024e9d2e5750f1ac677b1a8418c71656-3264x2448.jpg?w=1600&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint)

There is a stretch of the Côte d'Azur, between Cannes and Nice, where the road bends inland and starts climbing. The mountains here are not the dramatic Alpes-Maritimes of the Italian border — those are an hour further on. These are the lower hills above Vence — limestone, scrub oak, lavender starting at altitude, the air ten degrees cooler than the coast. The first village the road climbs to is Vence. The second, hooked into a cliff face above Vence, is Tourrettes-sur-Loup.

We were there yesterday.

We have been visiting Tourrettes for over a decade. It is the kind of village that does not need many travelers to feel itself — about four thousand people live here, the streets run to three parallel cobblestone lanes hung off the cliff edge, and the only reason most visitors discover it is because someone they trust told them about a workshop, a violet, a restaurant.

## The cliff and the violets

Tourrettes-sur-Loup sits perched on a ridge of stone with a long drop to the valley below. The medieval ramparts run on three sides; the fourth side is the cliff itself. From the village's western edge, you can see the whole stretch of the Vence valley falling away into haze, with the Mediterranean somewhere out beyond it. There is no resort architecture, no high-rise anything. The village is dense, low, beige stone — built into the rock rather than on it.

It is the violet capital of France. The fields of small purple flowers run on the plateaus around the village; the festival is in March (we will write about that in another piece, in another year); the violet ice cream and the violet liqueur and the candied violets are year-round. Every other shop is a maker. The Folon foundation — the late Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon's collection — is in the chapel, the small twelfth-century one, and is worth the half-hour. The fifty-plus working artisan workshops line the three streets and are, in our reading of this region over the years, the most concentrated artisan population per square meter on the Côte d'Azur.

![A cobblestone alley inside Tourrettes-sur-Loup, late-afternoon sun on stone — one of the three parallel cobblestone lanes that hang off the cliff edge through the village.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/3xxwvlfm/production/780394dbf672f6a9579187b86e1bc2e05e1431ef-1290x2293.jpg?w=1600&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint)
## The shop we always send people to

There is one workshop in particular we point everyone at. **Dubosq Et Fils — Le travail du bois d'olivier. Depuis 1958.** Olive wood, hand-worked. Boards, bowls, spoons, candle bases, the small sculptural pieces that look like driftwood-and-tool collaborations. The shop is at the entrance to the village, marked by a round wooden sign with an olive tree silhouette and (in our experience over the years) by an open doorway and the smell of cut wood.

![The entrance to Dubosq Et Fils — Le travail du bois d'olivier, depuis 1958 — at the edge of Tourrettes-sur-Loup, marked by a round wooden sign with an olive-tree silhouette and an open doorway with hand-worked olive-wood pieces inside.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/3xxwvlfm/production/5b53ee743ca3856f08a77fe7d4c6d577831c2651-4284x5712.jpg?w=1600&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint)
Olive-wood objects are everywhere on the Côte d'Azur. Most of them are mass-produced and finished with stain to look more grained than they are. Dubosq does the actual work — the wood is local, the cuts are by hand, the finishing is oil rather than stain, the imperfections in the wood become the character of the piece rather than a flaw to be hidden. We have brought home pieces over more than a decade — a board that we cut bread on still, a long olive-wood spoon, a small sculptural piece on the bookshelf. The pieces age. The bread board has stories on it. That is what you are buying.

## Lunch — the reopening, March 2026

Tourrettes has had restaurants for as long as there have been people in it. What it does not always have is *the* restaurant — the place an editor in residence on the Côte d'Azur sends people to without hedging. We had Spelt for years (more on that in a moment, with the dinner side). As of this March, we have a second one.

**Le Clovis** — [clovisgourmand.fr](https://clovisgourmand.fr), signage reads "Le Clovis" — reopened in March 2026 after a winter close. We were there yesterday for lunch. It is a small kitchen, maybe thirty covers between the dining room and the terrace; the menu is written in chalk on a board that hangs at the entrance, and again on a second board hung in the dining room. The structure is the formule-led one a serious country French kitchen should run: starter and main 53€, main and dessert 48€, the three-course at 65€, the four-course adding cheese at 73€, the five-course tasting menu at 95€. Wine pairings 35–65€ depending on the depth.

![The exterior of Le Clovis in Tourrettes-sur-Loup — the chalkboard menu hung at the entrance, the stone wall of the village behind it, the hanging lantern overhead.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/3xxwvlfm/production/af6733d61d5e6bb0fa31129659b807fb783b096a-4284x5712.jpg?w=1600&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint)
The menu yesterday — and the menu changes by the week — read like a producer roll-call. Provençal green asparagus. Trout from the Cians river. Duckling from the Dombes — Maison Miéral, the heritage producer. Devolui Valley sheep cheese. Piedmont hazelnuts (which is to say, sourced from Piedmont — sixty kilometers and one border away — rather than from a vague Italian elsewhere). Japanese basil. The sort of named-source register that signals the kitchen is paying attention.

We had the asparagus salad to start — green asparagus, orange and lemon, burrata ricotta, arugula, almonds — and the chocolate dessert to close. The wine pairing carried us through. Three or four ingredients given equal billing on the salad, the citrus doing the actual seasoning, the ricotta cool against it, the almonds for length. The chocolate dessert was built around Colombian chocolate with what was in season alongside it, and the wine pour with it was the closing argument. Producer-named ingredients only get you so far on a plate; what you also need is a kitchen that knows what to do with them. Le Clovis has it.

![The opening salad at Le Clovis — Provençal green asparagus, orange and lemon, burrata ricotta, arugula, and almonds, on an oak table in the dining room.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/3xxwvlfm/production/e494c9f9d3a302a06db14dd9a303d2ce83bfc2d1-4284x5712.jpg?w=1600&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint)
The terrace is the move. The dining room is fine — stone walls, open beam, oak tables — but the terrace opens onto the cobbled street and lets the village's afternoon light do the work. Sit there if the weather holds.

The bonus intel — and this is the kind of thing we believe is worth flagging because most readers will not know it — is the wine cave next to the kitchen. Le Clovis runs a curated retail wine selection in the same space: industrial metal shelving, hand-priced chalk tags, range from about €17 entry to €110 high-end, the same producer-named discipline as the menu. You can stop in for a recommendation to take home with you; the staff are happy to advise. We bought a bottle yesterday on the way out. The "All you need is love and wine" chalkboard above the entry shelf is the only off-register touch in the entire restaurant — and on the kind of weekend it is, pardonable.

![The wine cave below the kitchen at Le Clovis — industrial metal shelving stocked with bottles, hand-priced chalk tags, the producer-named discipline of the menu carried into the retail selection.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/3xxwvlfm/production/be56b0a99e377bc670c02ab7b233c0619c2161f6-4284x5712.jpg?w=1600&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint)
## Dinner — Spelt, La Table

The dinner restaurant in Tourrettes is **Spelt**, and Spelt is two restaurants in one. **Le Bistro** runs at lunch only — a classic-gourmet menu with two set-menu options: a three-course (with three starter choices, two main choices, two dessert choices) and a five-course set menu. **La Table** runs at dinner only — a single seven-course gastronomic discovery menu, no choices, *let yourself be guided*.

The editorial position is straightforward: for lunch, you can take either Le Clovis or Spelt's Le Bistro and the day will be a good one. For dinner, the move is Spelt — La Table. The seven-course discovery is the kind of meal you plan a Tourrettes weekend around. The kitchen has been building the discovery menu for years, and the village's evening light suits the slower pace.

## On the list for the next visit

There is one more opening worth flagging, even though we have not been yet. **Cinq** opened in December 2025 — [@cinq.tourrettes](https://www.instagram.com/cinq.tourrettes) on Instagram, based in the village proper. The format is unusual: five plates, fifty-five euros, fixed. No formules, no à la carte; you sit, you eat the five things, you leave. We are committed to the rule that we only recommend places we have been, but Cinq is on the next-visit list and will be reported back on. If the format is what it claims to be — and the photographs we have seen of the room and the plates suggest it is — Tourrettes will have a third dinner-register restaurant at the end of 2026, which would be a quietly serious depth of offering for a village of four thousand.

## When to go

Tourrettes is a four-season village; it does not have the high-summer-only rhythm of the coastal towns. The violets bloom in March; the violet festival is in March. The shoulder weeks (May, September, October) are the editorial answer — the air is cool, the village is quiet, the workshops are at full strength, the afternoon light through the cobblestone streets is what people who come back for years come back for. July and August work but the parking is harder and the air is hotter.

A note on logistics: Tourrettes is a thirty-minute drive northeast of Valbonne, where we live — and about thirty minutes from Nice Airport. Cannes, despite looking close on the map, is closer to fifty minutes or an hour by the time the coast road has had its way with you. Park outside the ramparts; the village is walking-only inside. Half a day is enough for the workshops; a full day if you stay for lunch (which you should). For a weekend, base yourself in Valbonne, thirty minutes south — Tourrettes itself does not have a serious hotel infrastructure, and that is part of why it has stayed itself.

A note on the drive itself. The road from the coast climbs through Châteauneuf-Grasse, Gourdon, and Pont du Loup before reaching Tourrettes — and in the season, May through October, these roads belong to the cyclists. Riders from clubs across the Côte d'Azur and beyond ride the climb from the coast into the mountains as serious training; the most serious continue past Tourrettes up to Caussols or the Col de Vence. The roads are narrow and shared, the switchbacks tight. Drive patient. Plan an extra fifteen minutes; you may be glad of them.

## Practical

**Tourrettes-sur-Loup** — Alpes-Maritimes, France. About 30 minutes northeast of Valbonne; 30 minutes from Nice Airport.

- **Dubosq Et Fils — Le Travail Du Bois D'Olivier:** Depuis 1958. Olive-wood workshop and shop, near the entrance to the village. Round wooden sign with olive-tree silhouette. Open most weekdays; confirm hours seasonally.
- **Le Clovis** ([clovisgourmand.fr](https://clovisgourmand.fr)): Reopened March 2026. Closed Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturday lunch. Lunch terrace recommended in fair weather. Wine cave next to the kitchen — ask for a recommendation. Formules from 53€; tasting menu 95€. Wine pairings 35–65€.
- **Spelt:** Le Bistro at lunch (classic-gourmet, two set menus); La Table at dinner (seven-course discovery). Reservations advised, especially for La Table.
- **Cinq** ([@cinq.tourrettes](https://www.instagram.com/cinq.tourrettes)) — *opened December 2025; we have not been:* Five plates, fifty-five euros, fixed format. On the next-visit list.
- **Folon Foundation:** In the village chapel. Half an hour worth budgeting.
- **Drive times:** 30 min northeast of Valbonne (our editor's base); 30 min from Nice Airport; 50–60 min from Cannes (the coast road takes longer than the map shows); 10 min from Vence (north up the cliff road).
- **A note on the drive:** From the coast, the climb goes through Châteauneuf-Grasse → Gourdon → Pont du Loup → Tourrettes. In season (May–October) the roads are full of cyclists riding from the coast into the mountains; the most serious continue up to Caussols or the Col de Vence. Drive patient — plan an extra 15 min.
*Le Journal lands every other Sunday, with more from the south of France. To get it in your inbox, subscribe at [afo.re](https://afo.re). To plan a Côte d'Azur week with Tourrettes built in, [DM us @aforetravel](https://instagram.com/aforetravel).*

> Source: [Tourrettes-sur-Loup, by an editor who lives thirty minutes away.](https://afo.re/journal/tourrettes-sur-loup) · Le Journal · Afore