Five-star hotels in La Celle: the abbey village of Provence Verte

A Provence Verte village 4 km from Brignoles

La Celle lies 4 km from Brignoles, at the foot of the first northern slopes of the Montagne de la Loube, part of the Sainte-Baume massif. The Caramy runs through the commune, which covers 21 km² between 219 and 827 metres and had 1,659 inhabitants in 2023. It belongs to the Provence Verte conurbation, and on Hotel5only it appears among the Var towns of the French Riviera collection.

The site was lived on long before the monks arrived: evidence of occupation reaches back to the end of the Iron Age and the Roman period, and excavations have revealed a Roman villa on the site of the monastery. Around the abbey, the village keeps a lavoir, the church of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption and traces of the vanished church of Sainte-Perpétue. Six kilometres out on the road towards Tourves, the chapel of La Gayolle is mentioned from 1019 in the cartulary of the abbey of Saint-Victor in Marseille.

Travellers comparing La Celle hotels with Brignoles hotels are choosing between this abbey village and the market town described below.

The Abbaye de La Celle, from double priory to national property

The abbey's story begins in 1011, when lands in the territory of Brignoles, with a church dedicated to Sainte-Perpétue, were given to the abbey of Saint-Victor in Marseille. The monks organised a double priory, with Sainte-Perpétue for the men and Sainte-Marie for the nuns. The buildings seen today date from the late 12th and early 13th centuries, and in the 13th century the house became an important female foundation, with more than a hundred Benedictine nuns drawn from aristocratic families of southern France.

The best known was Garsende de Sabran, Countess of Provence and mother of Raimond Bérenger IV, who took vows there in 1225 and remained until her death around 1242; her sculpted 13th-century sarcophagus is still kept in the church. Discipline later slackened. On 27 January 1660 Cardinal Mazarin, as commendatory abbot of Saint-Victor, ordered a reform, and in March of that year he had the nuns moved to Aix-en-Provence under the direction of nuns from the Val-de-Grâce in Paris.

Sold and divided as national property in 1792, the abbey became a farm. It was classified as a historic monument on 12 July 1886. The Département du Var acquired the site at the start of the 1990s and restored it in phases from 1998: the east wing, the cloister galleries, the south wing and, in a final phase planned for 2016 to 2021, the west gallery of the cloister and its gardens. The monument reopened in 2016 with nearly 700 m² open to the public, and its first exhibition after the final works, VILLAE, on Roman villas in southern Gaul, ran from May to October 2021.

La Celle hotels: the Hostellerie de L'Abbaye de La Celle

The Hostellerie de L'Abbaye de La Celle stands at 10 Place du Général de Gaulle, with 10 registered rooms and a five-star classification dating from October 2022. Its story is tied to the abbey's: after the monastery buildings were sold off following the Revolution, a hostellerie opened there in 1938, according to the Département. The hotel describes itself as an 18th-century inn that won over Alain Ducasse in 1999.

The rooms and suites, described as singular and intimate, are set in two character buildings with a refined Provençal atmosphere. The private park covers 2.5 hectares and holds a kitchen garden, an outdoor pool open from May to September, a terrace and a pétanque court. Bicycles are available, massages can be arranged subject to availability, and parking is private and enclosed, with electric vehicle charging.

The gastronomic restaurant takes a locavore approach, turning produce from the kitchen garden and nearby sources into revisited Provençal dishes, with a wine list focused on regional estates. As of 2026 the chef is Nicolas Pierantoni, who comes from the village. Breakfast is made to order from fresh, local and organic products that change with the seasons, and can be served in the dining room or the bedroom. Proper attire is requested. With so few rooms, the choice of category matters; the Hotel5only guide to comparing five-star hotels before booking sets out what to check.

Coteaux Varois en Provence, the wine of the Provence Verte

La Celle is one of the 28 communes, grouped around Brignoles, of the Coteaux Varois en Provence appellation, which gained AOC status by the decree of 24 March 1993. The vineyard covered 2,877 hectares in 2024, sheltered by the Sainte-Baume to the west, the Bessillons to the north and the Barres de Cuers to the south, and 91 per cent of its production is rosé. Reds and rosés rest mainly on Cinsault, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Syrah; whites on Clairette, Grenache Blanc, Sémillon, Ugni Blanc and Vermentino.

The vineyard has deep roots here: it is first mentioned in 558, in a charter of King Childebert concerning La Celle. A first delimitation as a vin de pays followed in 1974, and the present name, Coteaux Varois en Provence, dates from April 2009. The vines grow on Triassic, Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous limestones with red clays, relatively protected from the mistral, under about 300 days of sun a year; average temperatures run from 5°C in January to 23°C in July.

The appellation's Maison des Vins occupies another Département building on the former monastery estate, so the abbey, the hostellerie and the wine house share one site. In the Clos de l'Abbaye, visitors can walk freely through its conservatory vineyard of 88 grape varieties, and several wine estates work in the commune itself.

Other Provence wine country is within reach: the Côtes de Provence vineyards of the Dracénie surround Flayosc, and the coast at Bandol has an appellation of its own.

Brignoles and Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume

Brignoles, the market town next door, had about 17,850 inhabitants in 2023. The counts of Provence used it as a summer residence, and it was called the nurse and home of the crown's children because countesses gave birth there. The Musée du Pays Brignolais, in the former palace of the counts of Provence, keeps a find from La Celle itself: the marble sarcophagus from the chapel of La Gayolle, carved in the 2nd or 3rd century and reused in the 6th for a woman named Syagria, and classified as a historic object since 1919. The plain was long known for its prunes, made from the perdrigon plum, and the town stands on a former bauxite-mining basin crossed by the Caramy.

Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, 40 km east of Aix-en-Provence at the foot of the Sainte-Baume mountains, has the Gothic basilica of Mary Magdalene. Building began in 1295 under Charles II of Anjou, after a sarcophagus found in 1279 was proclaimed to be her tomb, and stopped in 1532, which is why the church still lacks its planned west front and bell towers.

Getting to La Celle by road

La Celle is reached through Brignoles, which is served by exit 35 of the A8 motorway and by the old Route Nationale 7, and a bus line of the regional Zou! network links the village with its neighbouring communes. The distances below are measured from Brignoles. Westbound, the A8 leads to Aix-en-Provence, whose five-star bastides and old town make a city counterpart to a country stay here.