Le Bruset is one of the seven Provencal bastides of Saint-Étienne-les-Orgues.

Take time to visit the others around the village: le Tondu, le Truyas, la Jonquière, Berle … Unfortunately, some of these bastides are today in very bad condition.

Provençal bastides are the distant heirs of the Gallo-Roman “villas”. They appeared throughout the south of France between the 13th and 19th centuries and were located outside the villages and their castles.

The bastides associate a residence of the owner for recreation, holiday and relaxation, and an agro-pastoral exploitation entrusted to a sharecropper or a farmer.

This duality allows the owner to ensure the most productive and profitable exploitation of the estate and to design the most relevant developments (essential hydraulic equipment for crops and livestock, plantations, road maintenance).

These dwellings generally belonged to the local nobility. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the Legouche family, lord of Saint Etienne les Orgues, owned the majority of the bastides of Saint-Étienne-les-Orgues. André Legouche bought Le Bruset in 1702 and sold it to the Marquis d’Oraison in 1785, who himself sold it to a “merchant-droguiste.”

Indeed, Saint-Étienne-les-Orgues has long lived from the gathering of medicinal plants in the Montagne de Lure, the merchants-druggists being at the same time gatherers, manufacturers of remedies and hawkers to the big cities (Marseille, Lyon or Toulouse) .