Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes is two very different places sewn together in 2016. To the west lies Auvergne, a high, quiet country of grassy volcanic cones, stone farms and cheese made in summer pastures; to the east, the Rhône valley and the Alps, with Lyon at the meeting of two rivers and Mont Blanc on the Italian border.

The region’s history runs from the painted cave of Chauvet, decorated some 36,000 years ago, through Roman Lugdunum and the silk workshops of Lyon to the spa towns where nineteenth-century Europe came to take the waters. Savoy only became French in 1860, and its villages still feel like their own small country. Further south, the Drôme and the Ardèche already smell of the Mediterranean, with lavender, olive trees and stone villages baking in the sun, while Lyon remains, by common agreement, one of the great food cities of France.

What it offers someone tired of Paris is space and air. You can walk a ring of extinct volcanoes before lunch, paddle under limestone arches in the Ardèche, or sit by a lake in a mountain town where the loudest thing is a church bell. Distances are long, so pick one corner and stay a while: the Chaîne des Puys, the Drôme’s lavender hills, Beaujolais villages or a valley in the Vanoise each reward a slow week far more than a dash between them.

• Volcanic cones of the Chaîne des Puys
• High pastures of the Cantal and Aubrac
• Limestone gorges of the Ardèche
• Glaciers and peaks of the Mont Blanc massif
• Alpine lakes: Annecy, Bourget, Léman
• Vineyard hills of Beaujolais and the northern Rhône

Facts

• Created on 1 January 2016 by merging the former regions of Auvergne and Rhône-Alpes.
• Mont Blanc, on the border with Italy, is the highest summit of the Alps.
• The Chaîne des Puys – Limagne fault tectonic arena was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2018.
• The decorated Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave in the Ardèche was inscribed by UNESCO in 2014.