The Pont du Galetas and the turquoise lake

This is the postcard everyone recognises: a stone arch spanning the last narrow of the canyon, tall pale cliffs closing in on both sides, and the water underneath an improbable milky turquoise. The colour is real and it is geology, not a filter — fine limestone flour carried by the Verdon scatters light and turns the river opaque green-blue. The lake behind it is a reservoir, filled in the mid-1970s when the Sainte-Croix dam went in.

There are two quite different pictures here. From the bridge parapet and the small viewpoints on the D957 you shoot down the throat of the gorge, cliffs left and right, boats as specks. From the beach on the north side you shoot back up at the bridge with the cliffs behind — and you can hire an electric boat, a pedalo or a kayak and paddle a kilometre or so into the canyon, which gives you frames nobody standing on the road can get.

Morning is best. The sun reaches into the gap early, the water is glass before the wind gets up around midday, and the boat hire has not yet queued out. By two in the afternoon in July the beach is packed and the channel is a traffic jam of pedalos. Petrol engines are not allowed on the lake, so it stays quiet even when it is busy.

The roadside parking here fills before nine in high summer and the bridge itself is a live road with no pavement to speak of — do the shots from the beach and the marked viewpoints, not from the carriageway. Water level, boat-hire season and any access rules change from year to year, so check before you build the session around a boat.