Mercantour

The Mercantour, protected in 1979, is where the Alps end: summits over 3,000 metres — the Gélas tops out at 3,143 — standing fifty kilometres from the Nice seafront, olive terraces in the valley mouths and glacial cirques at the valley heads. The compression shows in the botany, the richest of any French park: Mediterranean and Alpine floras interleave across seven valleys from the Roya to the Ubaye, with larch forests that turn incandescent in late October and endemics like Saxifraga florulenta, a rosette that grows for decades on Argentera granite, flowers once, and dies. Across the crest lies its Italian twin, the Parco naturale Alpi Marittime; the two have run as a paired protected area since 1987.

Two returns define the park's modern story. In 1992, wolves crossed from the Italian Apennine population into the Vésubie — the first in France in seventy years; the country's wolf recovery began here, with all the pastoral politics it still carries. And human memory runs deeper than anywhere in the high Alps: around Mont Bego, the Vallée des Merveilles and the Fontanalba valley hold some forty thousand rock engravings — horned figures, blades, the enigmatic "sorcerer" — pecked into ice-polished schist by Copper and Bronze Age herders. The engraved zones are sanctuaries in both the archaeological and regulatory senses: the core panels are visited with a guide.

The park also carries recent scars honestly: Storm Alex, in October 2020, tore the Vésubie, Roya and Tinée valleys apart, and while villages and the trail network have largely been rebuilt, some high paths still carry diversions — the park's trail bulletins are worth reading, not skimming.

What's worth knowing before you go

Saint-Martin-Vésubie is the classic western base; for the Merveilles, ride the Train des Merveilles from Nice up the Roya to Tende, where the Musée des Merveilles provides the key to what you'll see on the rock. The Lac d'Allos in the Haut-Verdon — reputedly Europe's largest natural lake at its altitude, an easy walk from the Allos road in summer — anchors the park's gentler southwestern side. High routes hold snow into June; the engraved valleys are guided-access from roughly mid-June to mid-October.

The connoisseur's choice is Fontanalba over the Merveilles proper: the same Bronze Age hands, softer light, and a fraction of the boots.