Some weeks the internet just hands you a holiday. This week's standout find is a house for sale in Provence, about 10 kilometres from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in a village built around the remains of a 12th-century Cistercian abbey. The property — listed with French heritage specialist Patrice Besse — includes a square stone defensive tower with a pointed-arched porch, attached to a two-storey stone house of roughly 110 square metres. Buy it, and there's over 70 square metres of attic space in the tower waiting to be converted, plus a 60-square-metre courtyard and a 30-square-metre terrace. The asking price is €275,000, which for a slice of abbey-adjacent Provence is notable.
The village itself sounds like the selling point. Two hamlets cluster around the Romano-Byzantine church, and the community runs a weekly market with the full Provençal lineup, alongside bars, restaurants, a school and a supermarket. Locals grow vegetables and make handicrafts, sold around the square. It's the kind of place you move to for the Saturday morning routine as much as the house.
The rest of the roundup is a grab-bag worth a browse if you're plotting trips or just killing time. There's the Restroom Archive, a crowdsourced project photographing public toilets around the world — searchable by location, and genuinely useful for anyone who's ever navigated a foreign city on a full bladder. Walkipedia maps every Wikipedia entry with coordinates within a 30-minute walk of wherever you're standing, which turns an ordinary afternoon stroll into an unplanned history tour. Railpass streams real train-journey footage from around the world, complete with sound, for when the window seat is a fantasy rather than a booking.
A couple of history nuggets round it out: Shell, the oil giant, started life as a London antiques shop that began selling decorative seashells in 1833 — demand grew so fast the owner started importing them from the Far East, and the import-export business evolved from there. And for film fans, the column champions Dr. Caligari (1989), a surreal, long-forgotten cult film inspired by the 1920 German Expressionist classic often credited as the first true horror movie. It's streaming on Shudder and AMC+ if you want a Halloween night in before your next trip.
Why does a list like this matter to travellers? Because the best trip ideas rarely come from top-ten lists. A property listing reveals a village you'd never have heard of; a map of nearby Wikipedia entries shows you what you've been walking past; a video of someone else's train ride might nudge you into booking your own. Add Saint-Rémy-de-Provence to the shortlist — the surrounding villages, markets and abbey ruins make an easy base for a slow week in the south of France.
Spotted on Messy Nessy Chic.
