Cévennes
Granite, schist and limestone under three climates — the inhabited national park, where terraced valleys, vulture gorges and Stevenson's trail meet Europe's great dark sky.
The Cévennes, protected in 1970, is the national park France built around people rather than despite them: alone among the eleven, its core is permanently inhabited — a few hundred residents farming, herding and coppicing inside the boundary — and in 2011 UNESCO listed the wider Causses and Cévennes precisely for that agropastoral civilisation. The park is a geology lesson in three rocks. Granite on Mont Lozère, the bald 1,699-metre dome where the Tarn rises among glacial boulders. Schist in the Cévennes proper: ridge after ridge of steep, folded country — the serres and valats — terraced centuries ago for sweet chestnut, the "bread tree" that fed the valleys. And limestone on the Causse Méjean, a high steppe plateau cut off on every side by the gorges of the Tarn and the Jonte, where wheatears cross between drystone sheepfolds and the grass hides orchids by the dozen species.
This is also memorial country. The Camisards — Protestant peasants who fought Louis XIV's dragoons — rose from these valleys in 1702, and the sobriety of the hamlets still reads Huguenot. Robert Louis Stevenson walked through with his donkey Modestine in 1878; his route, now the GR70, is the park's busiest long path. On the southern rim, Mont Aigoual carries the 1894 meteorological observatory on a summit where recorded gusts and deluges are national records, looking from the Alps to the sea on the right day. In the Jonte gorges, griffon vultures — reintroduced from 1981 after total extirpation — have rebuilt one of Europe's great colonies, joined since by cinereous and Egyptian vultures; the cliffs of Le Rozier hold more soaring tonnage than anywhere else in France. And at night the park goes properly black: the Cévennes was certified an International Dark Sky Reserve in 2018, the largest in Europe at the time.
What's worth knowing before you go
Florac, at the meeting point of the three rocks, is the park's headquarters and best base; Alès and Mende bracket the park, and the Cévenol railway from Clermont to Nîmes threads the eastern valleys with tiny stations. Summer on the causse is shadeless and the schist valleys hold heat; May–June and September–October are the walking seasons, and autumn's chestnut colour is the park at its most Cévenol.
The connoisseur's date is a late-May morning on the Causse Méjean — orchids underfoot, vultures overhead by ten — or the June transhumance festival at l'Espérou, when the flocks still climb the drailles to the Aigoual pastures on foot.