History of Valbonne

was offered by the bishop of Antibes to the abbey of Prads (Prads-Haute-Bleone, Alpes-de-Haut-Provence) who founded the abbey of St. Mary. At the time, this area was called Vallis Bona, meaning "the good valley." Later, it became known as Valbonne.

Prads and Valbonne were two of the 15 abbeys and priories of the monastic order of Chalais, an order of 'Dauphinois-Provençal' monks. The order was created a century earlier and was similar to the Cistercians. The poverty of these mountain-dwellers caused their disintegration and, in 1297 the abbot of Valbonne came under the authority of the abbey of St. Andrew of Villeneuve-les-Avignon. The bishop of Grasse refused to ratify the arrangement, and in 1303 offered St. Mary to the abbey of Lérins. In 1335 the Pope settled the question - he allocated St. Mary to Lérins.

At the end of the Middle Ages war, drought and the Black Death of 1351 caused the flight of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, and left the abbey and its environs deserted.

In 1486, under Louis XI, Provence was legally incorporated into the French royal domain, and this began the renaissance of the region. The village now known as Valbonne was founded in 1519, by Augustin de Grimaldi, bishop of Grasse and abbot of Lérins. Augustin de Grimaldi commissioned the worker-monk Don Taxil to construct the village adjacent to the abbey to increase the value of the land. The aim was to use exclusively local labour to build a community that would lead to the repopulation of the region. This was accomplished by the importation of Italian artisans, to work the clay found in the nearby villages of Vallauris and Biot.

The village is laid out along a grid pattern, under the influence of Roman military camps, with two principal avenues, arranged perpendicular to one another, and the forum at the intersection. Arcades were added to the central square in