The Mexican villas in Barcelonnette and the Ubaye valley

The chest of seven doors, and those who followed

In Mexico City the Arnaud brothers opened a cloth shop, El cajón de las siete puertas, the chest of seven doors. In 1845 the three weavers from Jausiers came home with more than 250,000 gold francs. Word travelled from hamlet to hamlet, and leaving for Mexico became an ordinary path for the young men of the valley. By 1890 the Barcelonnettes controlled the Mexican textile trade and its distribution; the following year they financed the country's first department store, El Palacio de Hierro. In 1910, of the six thousand French living in Mexico, four thousand eight hundred had been born in the Ubaye.

Around fifty villas in Barcelonnette, twenty in Jausiers

Those who returned had houses built that owe nothing to the architecture of the valley. The heritage inventory records around fifty in Barcelonnette and twenty in Jausiers, put up in three phases: eleven between 1870 and 1890, thirty-one in Barcelonnette during the golden age of 1890 to 1914, and nine more between 1920 and 1935, as the Mexican colony met its first difficulties. The model comes from the French seaside resorts, from Cabourg to Biarritz and the Riviera. Of Mexico, often only the name of the house remains: Morélia, San Carlos, La Tapiata.

La Sapinière, the only villa open to visitors

Alexandre Reynaud had La Sapinière built in 1878, on his return from Mexico, in six hectares of grounds. Bequeathed to the town in 1971, it has housed the Musée de la Vallée since 1988, awarded the Musée de France label in 2022. It is the only Mexican villa in Barcelonnette open to visitors: it has kept its walnut panelling, its marquetry floors, its 1910 Sarreguemines earthenware bathroom, its Art Nouveau stained glass and its smoking room. The others remain private and are seen from the street.

These men also had tombs built in the same years, sometimes on the same site as the villa. In Barcelonnette cemetery, opened in 1847, the funerary chapels range from neo-Gothic to Egyptian mastaba and mostly bear the signature of the Piedmontese marble carvers Pierre Rossetto and Luigi Rinaldi, who came from Barge; they combined limestone from the Queyras, marble from the upper Ubaye and marble from Carrara.

The Latin-Mexican festival, every August

Barcelonnette then strings papel picado above its streets and gives ten days to the Latin-Mexican festival — from 7 to 16 August in 2026. Mariachis, dancing and cooking take over the place Manuel and the grounds of La Sapinière. The Cardinalis tower, which stands over the square at forty-two metres, is all that remains of the Dominican convent.

From the Ubaye to the Bonette and Allos passes

Barcelonnette and Jausiers lie at the bottom of a valley that the passes connect to the rest of the southern Alps. From Jausiers, the Bonette road reaches 2,715 metres at the pass, then 2,802 metres on the loop around the summit — the highest paved road in France — before dropping towards Saint-Étienne-de-Tinée and the Mercantour. To the west, the Col d'Allos opens onto the upper Verdon. Upstream, the upper Ubaye valley climbs to the Col de Larche and the Italian border. The Bonette and Allos close in winter.