1802 Le Chatelard 

The history of Le Chatelard starts in the year of 1802, in the era of Napoleon Bonapart , when France had a new constitution and became a republic. The law permitting people to build houses only within the borderlines of the towns was revoked and one of the first houses build outside of the village Saint Auban was built by the farming family, Montaud. Their stone house, with a carving of the year on the front of the main entrance, not only shows the year of construction, the year 1802, but also marks the beginning of the company, Le Chatelard.

The name Le Chatelard comes from the name of the little hill, which is home to a “small church”, and is now the place where the farm stands. The Montaud farming family harvested wild lavender in those first years, which naturally grows on the mountains, and produced essential oil from it. By 1805 they had started to plant lavender in their own fields and not to depend only on natural wild lavender.