Tricastin
The Tricastin French pronunciation: [tʁikasˈtɛ̃] is a natural and historic region in the southern Rhône valley of southeastern France comprising the southwestern portion of the Drôme department and the northwestern portion of Vaucluse and centered on the modern town of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux.
The region is the cradle of the ancient Tricastini tribe, whose capital was Augusta Tricastinorum under Augustus's reign, now Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux. The name Tricastini, which for a long time was interpreted as meaning "the land of the Three Castles" in reality derives its name from the Ligurian tribe the Tricastini, which occupied the territory in antiquity.
Nowadays, the Tricastin region is known as the site of the Tricastin Nuclear Power Plant situated on the Donzère-Mondragon canal, a tributary of the Rhône, for its Rhône valley AOC wine grape Grignan-Les Adhemar, and for its natural and architectural endowment.
The Tricastini were one of the groups of people in the Narbonne area of Gaul. Pliny the Elder spoke of their capital named Augusta Tricastinorum in Natural History, Book 3. That some take this to be the modern Saint-Paul was noted by editor J. Bostock in note 63 of his 1855 translation.
Tricastin was considered as the "land of white stone" due to the fact that it is one of the only areas of the Rhône valley where the stone has such a light color. Numerous quarries were active up to the middle of the 20th century in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux and Saint-Restitut.
The capital Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux was the seat of a bishopric until the French Revolution when it was dissolved, the same fate as those of Uzes and Vaison-la-Romaine. The southern Tricastin town of Bollène was a commercial center during the whole medieval era and its center still contains traces of its flourishing past. Pont-Saint-Esprit and Bourg-Saint-Andéol, located on the western border, are also very old settlements where the mark left by religious influence is still very evident. They remained pilgrimage sites throughout the medieval era up until the French Revolution, and house numerous religious communities today.
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