France protects land in two tiers. The eleven national parks are the strict ones — the Vanoise (the first, 1963), the Écrins, the Pyrenees, the Cévennes, Port-Cros, Mercantour, the Calanques, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Guiana's Amazon and the Forests park. The 58 regional parks are lived-in landscapes managed by agreement rather than by rule: the Camargue, the Vercors, the Volcans d'Auvergne, Brittany's Armorique. Between them they cover roughly a fifth of French territory.
Start here
If you only do national & regional parks once in France.
-
The Calanques White limestone inlets between Marseille and Cassis, reachable on foot or by boat -
Écrins National Park Glaciers and 4,000 m peaks with no ski lifts on them at all -
Guadeloupe National Park Tree ferns, the Route de la Traversée, and a UNESCO biosphere reserve -
The Camargue White horses, black bulls and pink flamingos on the Rhône delta -
The Vercors A limestone fortress of a plateau, and a Resistance stronghold in 1944 -
Port-Cros France's first marine national park — with an underwater snorkel trail
Region by region
Île-de-France
Paris, Versailles and the ring of royal forests and cathedral towns around them
Hauts-de-France
Flemish belfries, the Opal Coast and the battlefields of the Somme
Grand Est
Champagne cellars, the Alsace wine road and Strasbourg's Christmas markets
Bourgogne-Franche-Comté
The world's most valuable vineyards, Romanesque abbeys and the Jura's quiet mountains
Brittany
2,700 km of granite coast, standing stones older than the pyramids, and a Celtic language
-
Perros-Guirec The base for the Pink Granite Coast and the Sept-Îles seabirds -
Ouessant The far west of France — five lighthouses and the Fromveur current -
Pointe du Raz A 70 m headland at the end of Brittany, in a permanent gale -
The Gulf of Morbihan An inland sea with about forty islands, and some of the strongest tides in Europe -
The Crozon Peninsula Three arms of cliff and turquoise cove inside a regional park
Occitanie
Carcassonne and the Cathar castles, the Canal du Midi, the Pyrenees and the Camargue's edge
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes
Mont Blanc, the world's largest linked ski areas, Lyon's kitchens and a chain of volcanoes
-
Chamonix Directly beneath Mont Blanc — the town that invented alpinism - Clermont-Ferrand A cathedral built from black lava, under a chain of volcanoes
-
Alps & Mont Blanc Western Europe's highest mountain and the largest linked ski areas on earth -
Auvergne & the Volcanoes Eighty volcanoes in a line down the Massif Central, and the spa towns beneath them -
Puy de Dôme 1,465 m of lava dome with a rack railway and a Roman temple on top -
Chaîne des Puys Eighty volcanoes in a line 32 km long, UNESCO-listed since 2018 -
Gorges de l'Ardèche 30 km of limestone canyon, paddled by around a million people a year
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
Lavender and Roman arenas inland, the Riviera on the coast, and the Alps behind both
-
Marseille The oldest city in France, 2,600 years old, with the Calanques next door -
Toulon A naval harbour under Mont Faron, and the ferry to Porquerolles -
Cassis A fishing port at the eastern end of the Calanques -
The Southern Alps The Verdon gorge, the Écrins, and 300 days of sun on the sunny side of the Alps -
Porquerolles White sand and pines inside a national park, twenty minutes offshore -
Gorges du Verdon 700 m deep and turquoise, from glacial rock flour in the water
Corsica
A mountain in the sea — 1,000 km of coast, the GR20, and a language of its own
-
Calanques de Piana Red porphyry towers dropping straight into the Gulf of Porto -
Scandola Nature Reserve A UNESCO marine reserve with no road to it — boat access only -
The GR20 180 km across Corsica's spine — often called Europe's hardest waymarked trek -
The Restonica Valley Glacial lakes above Corte, up a road that concentrates the mind
Guadeloupe
A butterfly-shaped Caribbean archipelago — rainforest on one wing, dry coast on the other
Martinique
The flower island — Mount Pelée, black-sand north, white-sand south and agricole rum
French Guiana
Amazon rainforest, a European spaceport, and the prison islands of Papillon
Réunion
An Indian Ocean volcano with three collapsed craters, and 1,000 km of walking trails
Mayotte
One of the world's largest lagoons, humpback whales, and a double coral barrier
Overseas collectivities
French, but outside the region geography.
Other kinds of place
-
Coast & beaches Three seas and an ocean — around 5,800 km of mainland coast, and far more overseas -
Mountains Six massifs — the Alps, Pyrenees, Jura, Vosges, Massif Central and Corsica -
Cities Paris, and eleven more cities that would headline any other country -
Villages & countryside The 180-odd villages on the official 'most beautiful in France' list