What Is the Valeurs Parc Label, and What Does It Mean?
A label exists in France that most visitors have never heard of, yet it sits quietly behind dozens of farms, workshops, and cultural sites across the country's protected landscapes. It's called Valeurs Parc — Park Values — and choosing a business that carries it means something beyond a simple transaction. It signals a working relationship with the land itself.
What Valeurs Parc actually means
France's regional nature parks — Parcs naturels régionaux — run a shared certification open to producers, craftspeople, accommodation providers, cultural sites, and tourism businesses operating within their boundaries. Joining is voluntary. Each business commits to working in step with its park rather than around it.
The label rests on a handful of commitments: a real connection to place, decisions that put people before profit margins, and active care for both natural and cultural heritage. None of it is abstract policy. It shapes how a farm grows, how a workshop teaches, how a museum tells its story.
More than a certificate
The network does double duty — it builds connections between businesses working the same land, and it gives visitors a way to recognise who's genuinely invested in the region rather than simply operating within it. Producers compare notes, and over time, a fair amount of what one business needs starts coming from another down the road instead of a supplier three regions away. Customers notice, too. Asking where something comes from has stopped being a niche concern, and carrying the label gives a business a clear answer. Over two thousand of them now do, spread across nearly fifty regional parks.
National in scope, local in practice
Every regional park in France shares this same label, which gives it a consistency visitors can rely on wherever they encounter it. But the way it plays out on the ground varies enormously. Each park adapts the framework to its own landscape, its own traditions, its own challenges — which is exactly the point. Burgundy's vineyards and a Provençal lavender farm operate nothing alike day to day, yet both work under the same underlying commitment.
The Luberon: a park worth knowing
The Luberon Regional Nature Park covers around 185,000 hectares. It stretches between Cavaillon and Lurs, built around the Luberon massif, with the Mourre Nègre rising above everything else as its high point. Nothing about the terrain stays the same for long. Forest gives way to scrubland. Scrubland breaks into limestone cliffs. Villages appear, built from that same stone. Somewhere across these slopes, alpine air runs into Mediterranean climate, and biodiversity ends up richer here than in most of the surrounding region.
Seventy-seven communes sit within its boundaries — Apt, Cavaillon, Manosque, and Pertuis among them — adding up to a population of just over 170,000. Old traditions haven't been pushed aside here — they've stayed put, even as everything around them keeps changing.
Two markers set the park apart on the world stage: UNESCO Biosphere Reserve status, and a Global Geopark designation. Landscapes don't earn either lightly. On the ground, what that recognition means is biodiversity monitoring, hands-on teaching that passes skills along, themed visitor centres, hiking and cycling routes, and a handful of educational programmes built for people who'd rather explore at their own speed than follow a fixed itinerary.
Where the Musée de la Lavande fits in
At the heart of the Luberon, the Musée de la Lavande carries the Valeurs Parc label as a natural extension of what it already does. Five generations of the same family have grown lavender here, and the museum now holds more than 350 original pieces tracing the plant's history across Provence — part family story, part regional history, part craft passed down through hands.
Exhibitions, hands-on workshops, guided tours — each one centres on agricultural and artisanal knowledge built up over generations, with a clear thread back to the land and forward to whoever comes through the doors next.
The museum isn't working toward this alone. Other sites nearby share the same outlook on sustainable, culturally grounded tourism. Roussillon's Écomusée de l'Ocre, for one, keeps the industrial and artistic history of natural ochre pigments alive. The Mines de Bruoux, meanwhile, lead visitors underground into a landscape shaped equally by geology and by generations of workers.
Lavender, ochre, stone — three very different materials, but one shared story: a Luberon shaped as much by human hands as by nature, told piece by piece across the sites that carry this same commitment.
Planning a visit to the Luberon
A family trip, a guided group, or just a detour while passing through Gordes or Avignon — any of these fits the Musée de la Lavande well. It sits in the Vaucluse, right at the centre of Provence, part of a wider Valeurs Parc network built around respecting both the landscape and the people who know it best.
Group visits, educational workshops, and custom events can be arranged directly with the museum team — a way into the Luberon's living heritage, shaped by people who've chosen to work with their region rather than simply within it.
