In the land of volcanoes…

A week to cross half of France along its meridian, walking between volcanoes and wild forests to reach Burgundy, and more precisely the Morvan (and its Regional Natural Parc). This week, we went down into a crater, climbed the highest peak in Burgundy, and learned a lot about the real Asterix and his contemporaries…

It seems that we have a thing for the weather… When it doesn’t rain all day, it rains for a good part of it, and when it seems that things are getting better, black clouds return and it starts to rain again…

From Millau to Garabit (20/05/2024)

Given that the weather forecast was rainy for the next few days, and that storms were even predicted, we decided to get a little closer to our next stop (the Puys range) by doing a “kilometre” leg… Of course, we could have gone further away, but we also had the opportunity to return to this place where we had slept on our return from Slovenia, with an impressive view of the Garabit Viaduct. From one bridge to another, then, and from modernity to historical heritage, since this viaduct was built by Gustave Eiffel (the one who made a tower 19 m too low, in Paris, for it to have the same height as the Millau Viaduct 😜), and which dates back to… 1880! And since it took 8 years to build (compared to 2 and a half for the Millau Viaduct), the Garabit Viaduct was inaugurated in 1888…

Of course, we are far from the modern architecture and the fluid lines of the Millau one, but at the same time, the Garabit Viaduct has that indescribable charm of ancient things to which time gives their letters of nobility… It is much shorter (only a little over 550 m) and much lower (122 m above the river), but at that time, and for some years, Monsieur Eiffel’s viaduct still held a world record: its arch was, in fact, the widest in the world!… And also, without wanting to preach for our parish for today, if we had to one day dismantle the two viaducts of Millau and Garabit, the latter would be the most ecological, since it is built almost entirely in steel (except for the bases of its pillars) and, therefore, it would be completely recyclable, unlike the concrete blocks of the Millau Viaduct… 😁

Few photos today due to the weather (although we are enjoying a little break and some rays of sun at the time of writing this post), and also because we haven’t really stopped, between Millau and here (except for a panorama of Millau, the Dourbie valley and gorges and the viaduct in the background, but the clouds were so low that not much could be seen). We limited ourselves to admiring the forests of Lozère and Aubrac, on both sides of the A75, remembering our time here last year, and thinking that the Causses are, without a doubt, a very beautiful and pleasant region…

The cheese route (21/05/2024)

The Cantal region is known for its… cheese! And that’s a good thing, because it seems like we have a little disagreement with the weather again. So we took advantage of the few minutes (well, okay, a good hour and a half today) without rain to go to the market!… In this case, Allanche, a very pretty little town halfway between Garabit and our destination of the day: the Puy de Sancy.

The photos aren’t very good, really, but the architecture in the area is quite pretty. Large stone houses, whose walls give the impression of being so thick that they could withstand the harshest winters… The roofs are made of stone or slate, and both versions combine perfectly with the stone of the walls…

In Allanche, there is a traditional market every Tuesday. It’s far from the biggest or prettiest in the area, but there’s a cheese truck at the entrance, so what more could you ask for? 😜 Allanche also has a Romanesque church, with human and animal heads sculpted around the nave, just below the roof. And since Sunday masses don’t give as much income anymore, part of the interior of the church has been converted into a mini-museum of all the Romanesque statues (not all complete or in very good condition) that were there, between two niches.

Apart from this, we would love to explain what the landscapes of Cantal or Puy de Dôme look like (since tonight we are in Puy de Dôme), but we have spent the whole day in the rain, with the clouds 10 m above the ground, so we can’t really say we saw much. In addition, the wind joined the party, with strong gusts predicted for tonight, so we went to take refuge in the forest. We are at the foot of the Puy de Sancy (the highest peak of the Massif Central, at 1,885 m), but of course we have not even seen its color… And the worst thing is that our weather app announces the same type of weather until Sunday at least! No doubt seeing volcanoes in these conditions will be quite a challenge!…

Today we tried to see Lake Chauvet from the shore and even took a photo, trying not to get our phones too wet. We also passed near Lake Pavin, but there, we did not have the courage to walk the 50 m that separated us from the shore to take another photo of yet another lake in the clouds. We will be well protected in our forest, and we will see tomorrow if we are lucky enough to see a volcano (and if not, we are not far from Saint Nectaire, a town also known for its… cheese! 😜)… And to console ourselves, we can always look the photos of the Garabit viaduct illuminated last night… A small moment of magic in which even the clouds dissipated for a moment to reveal a small corner of blue sky…

In the land of volcanoes (22/05/2024)

We woke up with a beautiful blue sky above our heads, and we thought we must still be dreaming… But the big clouds that began to cover all the blue around us quickly confirmed that no, we were completely awake… 😉

“Al mal temps, bona cara”, as we say in Catalan, so we decided to follow the recommendations of the Auvergne Volcanoes Park website (a very well made and very useful website, by the way), and follow one of the routes highlighted to reach the north of Clermont-Ferrand via secondary roads. It was probably a good idea, because we were finally able to complete the 150 km route with just four drops of rain now and then. So we were finally able to see the landscapes of Auvergne, and… it was really worth it!

Besse

First stop in Besse, very close to where we slept. Besse is a medium-sized town, best known for its ski resort (Super-Besse), but also for being a fairly well-preserved medieval town. And indeed, it was very sensible to make a stop and take a brief walk through the historic center! In addition to the weather vane of his guard tower (in the shape of a wolf’s head) and his “house of Queen Margot” (where she is said to have spent a night during her exile in Auvergne), Besse also has a volcanic stone church, with all the pillar capitals sculpted with various figures and scenes (we discovered, throughout the day, that this is quite common around here…). The curious thing is that the virgin (Notre Dame de Besse) is black… In itself, nothing exceptional (we have several black virgins in the south…), but the explanation on the sign placed right next to the statue is quite good: in reality, the Virgin of Besse is not really black. It has the color of wood that has been preserved in volcanic soil. That of the wood that has remained in the sun, that has suffered the rigours of harsh winters and, ultimately, that has the patina of the skin of the people of this land… A good explanation, right? All this not to recognise that she is black and that’s it!… 😁 Otherwise, even with this rainy weather, it was very pleasant to get lost in the narrow streets of Besse, among the stone houses…

Saint Floret

We then went to Saint Floret, its castle and… its picturesque style, with its cobblestone streets and stone houses. We came to Saint Floret for its castle (unfortunately closed), and discovered the rest of the town, which is undoubtedly also worth it (maybe even more than the castle)…

Saint NECTAIRE

Completely by chance (or almost 😇), the Saint Floret road took us to Saint Nectaire… Let’s say it right away, we didn’t see a single cow, and the only dairy we passed had a very industrial look for such a… local cheese. But hey, we didn’t try to find farms that sold their own cheese either, so…

Saint Nectaire is divided into two: the lower town (surprisingly called Saint-Nectaire-le-bas) and the upper town (Saint-Nectaire-le-haut 🤔), which is home to the imposing Basilica of Saint Nectaire which, in short, is more or less the only thing to see in town. Because yes, before being a cheese, Saint Nectaire was a man. He was even called Ypace, until Saint Peter (in person) baptised him on the banks of the Tiber and gave him the name of Nectaire as his baptismal name… With this beautiful name (very fashionable at the time, in festive circles), Ypace received from Saint Peter the mission of evangelising Auvergne (which, already then, was showing its rebellious spirit resisting Christianity)… It is for his good and loyal services as an evangelist that Nectaire was canonised and became… Saint Nectaire (before evolving, later, towards a type of cheese…)

Be that as it may, the basilica dedicated to Saint Nectaire, in the town that bears his name, is without a doubt the most beautiful and imposing that we have seen today. Made of volcanic stone, it also has the capitals of its pillars sculpted with scenes that tell the life and work of Saint Nectaire, but what is most surprising is that some of these capitals still retain their original colours. In a corner of the basilica we also find the arm of Saint Nectaire (well… the relic of his arm), as well as the bust of his brother Baudime, also in the form of a relic…

Orcival

From one basilica to another, as our next stop was Notre Dame d’Orcival, another jewel of the Romanesque style of Auvergne. To get there, we pass through the Croix-Morand pass (1,401 m), which separates the southern area (Sancy) from the northern part of the Puys range. Here we began to see our first volcanoes, when after crossing the pass in the fog, the landscape suddenly became clear as we descended back into the valley, on the other side. The views were obviously spectacular, but what surprised us most was the Tuilière rock, a mountain entirely made up of basalt cones, which form like steps to the top.

The Basilica of Orcival is less “decorated” than that of Saint Nectaire, but impresses with its dimensions. No doubt that is why it was classified as a Historical Monument as soon as the first list was published, in 1840.

CASTLE OF Chazeron

Finally, to close our circuit, we continued to the Chazeron Castle, near Volvic. According to the legend told on the tablets of Theonugus the Elder, there was a sacred spring on Chazeron Hill. The gods gave the ability of reason to the surrounding bears and they built a temple there. Over time, the temple became a castle, then a state prison under the Vichy regime, before falling into oblivion until an association (founded by the current owners) took it upon itself to rehabilitate it and open it to the public. It is a beautiful fortress from the 11th century, to which a stately residence was added in the 15th century. In the 17th century, Louis XIV had to go to Chazeron to decorate the Marquis François de Monestay de Chazeron in gratitude for his war exploits (too numerous to explain here…). To accommodate him, the Marquis de Chazeron ordered the transformation of the medieval castle into a Versailles-style residence. In front of the fortress, which was also improved, two classical-style wings were built on each side of a large courtyard. Unfortunately the marquis died before finishing the work and the arrival of the Roi Soleil.

Before reaching this one, we also passed by two other castles (Cordès and Dauphin), but as they are private, they can only be visited in summer, during school holidays…

To complete our tour, we settled on the heights of Volvic, where from our broom meadow we had an impressive view of the Clermont-Ferrand plain and, to the right, a good part of the Puys range, with the Puy de Dôme in the middle… 😍

Down into the crater… (23/05/2024)

In one of the versions of the Lost World, the protagonists discover a huge volcano crater that has remained isolated from the world, in which dinosaurs still survive. Our crater would probably be a little small for a dinosaur to take shelter in, but it’s no less photogenic, with its typical… volcano crater shape! 🤓

We couldn’t leave the Puys area without climbing a volcano and seeing what it looks like once at the top. So today, braving the bad weather and putting our lives at risk (those who think that volcanic soil does not produce mud or is not slippery when it rains are seriously mistaken…), we prepared ourselves to climb a volcano! Ok, since we are neither Haroun Tazieff nor Katia and Maurice Krafft, we chose one that was not too high (1,209 m). Following the wise advice of one of our followers, we undertook the (partially aquatic) ascent of the Puy de Pariou!

For those who have the impression (like me this morning) of having already seen this volcano somewhere, it is very possible, since the Puy de Pariou is the volcano that serves as the logo for Volvic water. Therefore, it can be seen on any bottle of Volvic… Furthermore, the Puy de Pariou has the particularity of being easily accessible (just 5 km, in a loop, for the round trip to the parking lot), and of having kept this typical shape that volcano craters have in our collective imagination (those who have seen the Puy de Dôme know that this is rarely the case in the real world, in fact…). To keep it that way, a wooden staircase was installed to protect the slopes of the crater from erosion caused by the thousands of tourists who climb there each year, and the bottom of the crater, previously accessible, is now closed and in the revegetation phase.

The other peculiarity of Pariou is that these lands were historically donated by the Countess of Montferrand to the inhabitants of the surrounding villages. In fact, even today, the Puy du Pariou is “undelimited land” for cadastre purposes. It is divided into plots that cannot be located and each one belongs to a different owner. Thus, in addition to the Auvergne Volcanoes Regional Park, which looks after the environmental management of the place, a local association to which all the inhabitants of the surrounding area belong also participates in the management.

On a clear day, the Pariou also offers a beautiful panorama of its neighbor, the Puy de Dôme, but that was not really the case today. The clouds were too low to see beyond the other volcano located right next door: the Puy des Goules. Therefore, we had to detour towards the Vulcania amusement park to be able to take a closer photo of the Puy de Dome (we hesitated to go in, but seeing the twenty school buses parked there, we decided that perhaps it was not the best idea in the world… 😜)

So before continuing a little further north, we went to lose ourselves in the magnificent Saint-Ours forest, where we slept that night. We were in the town of Saint-Ours, a stone’s throw from Vulcania, but the forest was so spectacular and wild that we could have thought ourselves miles away from any civilisation. The perfect place to spend a last night before continuing to our next stops: the Morvan Regional Natural Park, the Beaune region and the Nuits-Saint-George vineyards…

Asterix is lying to us! (25/05/2024)

After just over 200 km crossing fields, fields and… more fields, we saw some vague undulations suddenly appear on the horizon. Forested “hills”, covered with fir trees of all types, all of them well aligned diagonally to the direction of the slope. The ONF had certainly been there! 😁

We are in the Morvan, in the Regional Park of the same name, on the border between the departments of Nièvre and Saône et Loire (Loire that we have officially crossed, which officially places us in the “north of France” 🙄). Here the mountains are rounded and covered with forests to the top. Summits that, furthermore, do not exceed 1,000 m, since for our first night in Burgundy (yes, the Morvan is part of Burgundy), we chose the highest point in the region, at a dizzying altitude of… 901 m!

We are about twenty kilometers from Château-Chinon, and we thought that, if the weather did not improve, we could always go visit the vineyards, but it seems that the weather worries about the health of our livers, and although yesterday we arrived in the rain (despite having traveled 200 km with sun and not a drop), today the weather was finally good again, with only a small shower at midday and the rest of the day sunny…

Morvan is, without a doubt, famous for many things (although I can’t think of any like that, right away…), but there is one thing we did not expect to find here (with all humility in the face of the extent of our lack of culture…). It turns out that here, right next to the Haut Folin where we slept, one of the most important pages in the History of Europe took place (with a capital “H”… in “history”… not in “heuropa”… 😜).

Right next to Haut Folin is another mountain that bears the strange name of Mont Beuvray. It turns out that it is precisely here that in 52 BC, Vercingetorix was officially recognised as head of the Gallic coalition against Rome. It is also here that Julius Caesar came several times, first to prepare for the battle of Alésia (where he defeated Vercingetorix and added Gaul to his empire) and ask for support from the Aedui, and then, upon returning from Alésia, to write the last chapters of his book “The Gallic War”.

Mont Beuvray is where Bibracte was located, the capital of the Aedui, one of the main tribes of Gaul whose territory occupied much of northern France and the Benelux. It was an oppidum that housed up to 15,000 people and, according to Caesar himself, one of the few Gallic cities worthy of interest at the time. If the forest has recovered its rights and today covers a good part of the city, the archaeological excavations carried out over the years have allowed the stones to be found again and the remains of the different parts of the city or its enclosures, 5 km long, to be rediscovered. Bibracte was also one of the only large Gallic cities built at the top of a mountain (rather than at the bottom of a valley where it is easier to cultivate the land or dig canals to bring water to the fields), and the one that was first “Romanized” after Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. To clearly mark their dominance, the Romans, through Augustus after Caesar’s death, took the trouble to “migrate” all the inhabitants of Bibracte to the valley, at the site of present-day Autun. Bibracte was therefore abandoned until a local archaeologist undertook excavations before the First World War, but the war put an end to his momentum (and his life), and Bibracte remained forgotten until François Mitterrand became passionate about the place and provided exceptional funding to turn Bibracte into the major archaeological site it is today.

A museum (very well done) completes the archaeological site and allows us to realize that the Gauls were, in reality, very far from the image conveyed by Asterix and Obelix, and also far from the “fake news” spread by Caesar or his successors. in their respective books, more intended to flatter the ego of their authors than to explain the truth about the people they had conquered… The excavations of Bibracte have made it possible, for example, to confirm that the Gauls did not live in small towns. surrounded by a wooden fence, in the middle of a large forest where they hunted wild boars. In fact, there were very few forests in the time of the Gauls, since they had already deforested everything to create fields and dedicate themselves to their favorite pastime: agriculture. They ate very few wild boars, and for a good reason: they were not very good hunters and killing a wild boar was not as easy as aiming more or less right and having a few bullets, at that time. The Gallic cities were linked to each other by a dense network of roads, and the Gauls traded with all of Europe and much of Western Asia. The truth, however, is that what the Gauls loved the most (after cultivating their fields) was to fight among themselves (which Caesar did not fail to observe and skillfully took advantage of to conquer Gaul). The Aedui, for example, were allies of Rome (even though they were Gauls). They were even the last to join the “rebel coalition” led by Vercingetorix. In the end, they double-betrayed Caesar by joining the coalition and failing to send the troops they had promised to the battle of Alesia, but it was too late for Vercingetorix. Evil tongues say that before bringing him back to Rome to show him to the people, Caesar made his convoy (including Vercingetorix) pass through Bibracte, to make him believe that the Aedui had failed to help him, and at the same time to forgive them for their betrayal. No one was very surprised that a Gallic tribe preferred to ally with Rome to attack another Gallic tribe, rather than the opposite… In Bibracte, there is a large rock in the forest called the Wivre Rock. Among other legends, this is supposed to be where Vercingetoryx climbed to give his speech to the Aedui and convince them to join him. The rock has a cavity, in its upper part, that is apparently always filled with water. Legend has it that these were the tears of Vercingetorix, upon his return from Alesia, when he realized that the Aedui had not sent troops to Alesia, neither to help the Romans, nor to help him…

In short, a really interesting day in a place full of history and symbolism. The other peculiarity of the Bibracte forest are the “Queules”, these trees with twisted, rounded trunks, full of potholes and strange shapes. These are, in fact, remains of old hedges. In the past, young trees were braided to create hedges and thus delimit the fields. As soon as a hedge thinned, the young branches were bent towards the ground and woven like wicker. A technique that has come a long way since the inhabitants of Bibracte already used it in the time of Caesar and Vercingetorix!

Next week, we will continue our exploration of the vineyards of Burgundy before going a little further North and closer to the German border. Before but, don’t forget to watch the video summary of week 8!…

Regresar al Blog

ON A VOLCANO, as anywhere else, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.