One Sorgue arrives at the Partage des Eaux, two leave

Feeding the mills and watering the fields

The water of the Sorgue serves more than one purpose. It is diverted to irrigate the fields, and it is kept running to turn the wheels: on one side those who water, on the other those who mill. The two uses work against each other, since what one takes never returns to the other’s channel. A share has always had to be set between them — and that has not stopped: the task falls today to the syndicat mixte du bassin des Sorgues, the public body that manages the river basin.

The division at the Partage des Eaux is not accidental: it is prescribed. A decree of 1852 fixes the share due to each arm — five twelfths on one side, seven on the other — and the larger goes to the Entraigues arm, which runs through the town. The point was to guarantee the steady flow on which the flour mills and factories downstream depended. The proportion is written into the stone: forty metres of crest for the Velleron weir, fifty-six for the Entraigues one.

Downstream, in the town, the great water wheels turned the silk mills and paper mills of the nineteenth century.

A river that divides instead of gathering

An ordinary river collects the streams that join it and forms larger arms. The Sorgue does the opposite: it starts as a single body of water, then divides, and divides again. Thirty-two kilometres separate its source from its confluence, yet the network they make up runs to several hundred kilometres of arms and channels.

It is not entirely natural. From the early twelfth century, people dug, diverted and channelled — to drain the marshes known as the paluds, and to capture the power of the current. The Partage des Eaux is the clearest illustration of that patient work: the river was no longer left to decide.

The water comes from a resurgence: it leaves the ground at around thirteen degrees Celsius, close to 55°F, and barely moves from it, winter or summer. It has travelled deep enough under the plateau to ignore the seasons, and its steady flow knows nothing of the moods of surface rivers. By the end of summer, when it is at its lowest, the bed appears — pebbles, gravel, and the long weed combed by the current. Those beds shelter spawning grounds and invertebrates; the ecosystem is a fragile one, hence the notice posted along the banks: walk beside the river rather than in it.

Ducks are at home here, and so are coypu — brought from South America in the nineteenth century for their fur, and whose burrows weaken the banks. More discreet, the white-throated dipper walks under water to find its food; it is taken as an indicator of water quality.

Under the trees at the Partage des Eaux

Around the two weirs the bank is planted with tall trees and the shade is deep. A space has been laid out, with tables on the grass and on the beaten earth, and there is room for children. People come here for the coolness: in summer, a river at thirteen degrees under the canopy is a piece of luck for the day.

The water flows on into the town

Downstream, the Entraigues arm reaches the old centre and slips between the quays. There it divides once more, into the channels that close around the old town — and it is from this last division that the town takes its name. The water keeps everything it had upstream: the clarity, the coolness, and the combed weed waving beneath the surface a few metres from the housefronts.

The nègo-chin, a boat shaped for the Sorgue

It has a flat bottom, because the water is shallow, and is worked standing up with a pole — the partego, cut from hazel or red willow. Its name translates as “drown-dog”: the fishermen of the town, the pescaïres, joked about its balance by warning a neighbour that they were off to drown his dog.

In early August the nègo-chin go back to work. Loaded with flowers, fruit, vegetables, cheese and bread, they sell from one quay to the other for the floating market, poled by boatmen in costume, while summer visitors crowd the banks and the bridges to watch them pass.

The custom itself is recent. It was thought up by René Légier, then deputy mayor, on his return from a trip to Thailand where he had seen the floating markets of Bangkok: the boat belongs to the Sorgue, the festival comes from elsewhere. The success was immediate — television covered the first edition — and the town has held it every summer since.

More to see along the Sorgue

For the rest of the year, it is the stalls of the Sunday market that fill these quays. Upstream, the river leads to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and the ruins of the château des Évêques; around it, Saumane-de-Vaucluse, Le Thor and Velleron continue the run of villages born of this network.