The Most Spectacular Cliffs in France
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular cliffs in France are Cirque de Gavarnie, Pointe du Raz and Falaises Soubeyranes. The list covers 5 cliffs. Last updated 14 October 2026.
France's cliffs are remarkably varied for one country. Glaciers carved the high Pyrenees into vast rock amphitheatres, the Atlantic hammers the hard granite of Brittany's westernmost capes, and along the Channel the sea cuts soft white chalk into arches and needles that painters made famous.
The Cirque de Gavarnie is a glacial amphitheatre whose walls of stepped limestone rise well over a kilometre, crossed by the Grande Cascade, one of the tallest waterfalls in Europe; Victor Hugo was among its admirers. Pointe du Raz, at the tip of Finistère in Brittany, juts into the Atlantic on dark cliffs above the fierce currents of the Raz de Sein, with a lighthouse on a rock offshore. The Étretat Cliffs in Normandy form chalk arches and a freestanding needle, the Aiguille, painted many times by Claude Monet.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cirque de Gavarnie | Cliff | |
| 2 | Pointe du Raz | Cliff | |
| 3 | Falaises Soubeyranes | Cliff | |
| 4 | Les Pénitents des Mées | Cliff | |
| 5 | Étretat Cliffs | Cliff |
01 Cirque de Gavarnie
France42.695° N 0.009° W
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The centrepiece is the Grande Cascade. It drops 422 metres in a series of leaps down the back wall and is counted among the tallest waterfalls in Europe. The valley floor sits at about 1,570 metres, and its meadows hold martagon lilies in the pine woods and saxifrages on the rock, while Pyrenean chamois work the ledges above. Every summer the cirque becomes a stage in a more literal sense: the Festival de Gavarnie puts on open-air theatre with the walls as backdrop, drawing around ten thousand spectators.
Did you know? Much of the waterfall's water comes from snowmelt and a small glacier on the Spanish side, which seeps underground and emerges at the lip of the cliff.
02 Pointe du Raz
France48.040° N 4.741° W
Jean-Pol GRANDMONT · CC BY-SA 4.0 The point forms the southern prong of a rocky trident thrusting into the Iroise Sea, together with the Crozon peninsula and the Pointe Saint-Mathieu, and it is linked by the sweep of the Baie des Trépassés to its northern twin, the Pointe du Van. Painters such as Eugène Boudin travelled here in the nineteenth century, and Daphne du Maurier used the headland as an image of tempestuous feeling in her novel Frenchman's Creek. The site was classified as a protected landscape in 1987 and received the Grand Site de France label in 2004. It is also the western end of the long-distance E5 footpath, which runs some 3,200 km to Venice.
Did you know? Beneath the point the sea has carved the Enfer de Plogoff, a tunnel roughly 60 metres long running through the rock from east to west.
03 Falaises Soubeyranes
France · 19.6 km from Marseille43.184° N 5.563° E
Mmullie (WMF) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The cliffs are also a refuge for wildlife. Peregrine falcons and eagle owls nest on the ledges, bats shelter in the caves, and the European shag, rare on the French mainland, breeds along the base of the rock. The hills behind were used by people from the Neolithic onwards, and old farming terraces and sandstone quarries survive in the scrub. Along the crest runs the Route des Crêtes, a road built in the 1960s that follows the cliff tops between Cassis and La Ciotat, with long views over both bays and out to sea. The whole massif now lies within the Calanques National Park.
Did you know? The cliffs are built of limestone, sandstone and puddingstone laid down about 80 million years ago at a river mouth.
04 Les Pénitents des Mées
Les Pénitents
France44.027° N 5.986° E
Zairon · CC BY 4.0 Local tradition explains the rocks very differently. In the best-known version of the legend, a lord returning from fighting the Saracens brought back a group of beautiful Moorish captives, and the monks of the nearby Montagne de Lure were made to escort them, hoods drawn down so as not to be tempted. When the monks could not resist lifting their eyes to look at the women, they were punished on the spot and turned to stone; some tellings credit the judgement to Saint Donat, a hermit venerated in the region.
Did you know? The rocks are a conglomerate of Alpine pebbles cemented together in the Miocene and Pliocene epochs.
05 Étretat Cliffs
Site d'Étretat
France · 23.3 km from Le Havre49.706° N 0.195° E
Image by Safia_Pictures from Pixabay The light on this coast drew painters long before mass tourism: Boudin, Daubigny and Courbet worked here, and Claude Monet painted the arches and the Needle again and again in the mid-1880s, in every weather and at every hour. Maupassant described the Porte d'Amont in his novel Une vie. On top of the Falaise d'Amont stand the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, rebuilt after the Second World War, and a monument and small museum honouring Nungesser and Coli, the aviators who took off from Le Bourget in 1927 in the White Bird to fly the Atlantic and were never seen again. Stairways of 180 and 263 steps climb the two cliffs, and the site has carried the Grand Site de France label since 2012.
Did you know? During a single three-week stay in 1883, Claude Monet painted around twenty canvases at Étretat, and he came back every year until 1886.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most spectacular cliffs in France?
- On our list, Cirque de Gavarnie ranks first, followed by Pointe du Raz and Falaises Soubeyranes.
- How was the Cirque de Gavarnie formed?
- Glaciers flowing from the high Pyrenees scoured out a great semicircular basin, leaving vertical walls of layered rock. It forms part of the Pyrénées – Mont Perdu UNESCO World Heritage Site, shared with Spain.
- What are the arches at Étretat called?
- The three arches are the Porte d'Amont, the Porte d'Aval and the Manneporte, with the needle called the Aiguille standing beside the Porte d'Aval. Maurice Leblanc made the needle the hiding place of a treasure in an Arsène Lupin novel.
- Why is the sea at Pointe du Raz so dangerous?
- Between the cape and the Île de Sein the tide forces a large volume of water through a narrow, rocky passage, creating strong currents. The Raz de Sein has long been one of the most feared stretches of the French coast.
- How many cliffs are on this list in France?
- The list covers 5 cliffs.