Hi everyone,

Bories, are old habitacions that we can find in the Provence forests.

Depending on the area there's a lot of them. Here, all pictures had been taken in Vaucluse.

They present a picturesque allure, as lovely as intriguing. 

The building process takes a lot of time but is very simple. They had been built with only dry stones, nothing else.

To have quality dry stones you need to take a lot of stones (on the floor, no need to quary most of them) make a pile and leave them on the sunlight a couple of years.

The stones who did not break over the Sun heat will make good construction material. The rest of the pile can be used as a hight point of view, and, you probably already understood, all the stones took from the floor give you a clean field.

There's a lot of myths around these structures. Houses of poor people, hermits, millenium olds etc...

In fact, they was like we could say secondary houses. Farmers, lived in the town, but without a car, and to save time on the goings and comings to the fields, they ordered them constructions. Of course, some farmers were living full time in that kind of habitat, but, several of them together were forming small villages (like the one next to Gordes called "le village des Bories"). Shepherds were using them too, but a lot of smallest ones on the transhumance path. 

Even if I never saw twice the same it is a documented fact than some of them had been planed by architects.

They had been built during the 17th and 18th centuries. Except the "Village des bories", in my nokwledge, none of them are planed to be preserved.

They are the result of 3 millenium of building knowledge with dry stones. But the present does not wait and we can't save all the old stuff, there's just too many and a lot of others buildings are more valuable for turism. Local people love them and don't touch them. The majority is deep hide in the forests, they will survive for some time I'm sure of that.

Thank's for reading.