Cirque de Navacelles

Interesting facts

On 9 June 2017 a world record for slackline length was set here, on a 1,680-metre line strung across the cirque between Gard and Hérault.

The spring that feeds the Vis has occasionally stopped flowing: locals recall it running dry for 24 hours in 1890 and for a few hours in 1922, 1927 and 1961.

The hamlet's people were once nicknamed 'lous gulars', the shouters, because they had to raise their voices over the roar of the waterfall.

A cave in the cliffs above, reachable only by rope ladder, has yielded remains from the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, Roman times and the Renaissance.

A farm on the site of today's southern viewpoint is named in the will of William of Gellone as early as 807.

Geologists link the final fixing of the cut-off to people: clearing and farming the plateaus increased runoff, which stopped the moss-built tufa from growing.

In 1643 the local land register listed 26 property owners, sixteen of whom were called Jourdan.

Part of the Vis now bypasses the waterfall in a canal around the old meander, feeding a hydroelectric plant about 12 km downstream.

In floods the river can spill back into its abandoned loop, briefly turning the green meander floor into water again.

The original village grew up around a monastic cloister, of which only the apse of a chapel survives in the present cemetery.

Why it is worth it

On the southern edge of the Massif Central, the gorge of the river Vis opens into an immense circular amphitheatre of limestone cliffs, and on its floor lies an almost perfect island of green fields wrapped around a solitary hill – the bed of a meander the river abandoned. Beside it, the small hamlet of Navacelles sits at the point where the Vis now cuts straight across, tumbling over a waterfall. The Cirque de Navacelles is one of the most dramatic landforms of the Grands Causses, the high limestone plateaus of southern France, and lies between the Causse du Larzac to the south and the Causse de Blandas to the north.

The plateaus are made of Jurassic marine limestone, alternating with dolomite and marl. Faulting fractured the uplifted plateau, and during the Pleistocene the Vis wound in lazy meanders across a flat stretch of its course before cutting down into the rock. At Navacelles the neck of one loop was breached around 6,000 years ago, helped by a build-up of tufa that had raised the riverbed; the river then incised the tufa downstream, fixing its new short course and leaving the old loop dry. The cut-off meander became an oxbow lake that later filled with silt and peat, creating the only arable land for miles around. The Vis itself reappears from underground at a spring about 5 km upstream of the waterfall.

The site has been inhabited for more than a thousand years. A tenth-century charter of the abbey of Gellone, at Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, already names the place as Novacella, and the monks were active here for centuries. The bridge over the Vis was commissioned in a notarial act of 1595. The hamlet is divided between two communes and two departments, Hérault and Gard. The cliffs shelter golden eagles, griffon and cinereous vultures, peregrine falcons and eagle owls, and the gorges are protected under European nature directives. The cirque has been a classified site since 1943 and received the Grand Site de France label in 2016.

Getting there

Roads descend into the cirque from viewpoints on both plateaus: the D130 from the south via Saint-Maurice-Navacelles and the D713 from the north via Blandas, both linking to the A75 motorway. The nearest towns are Le Vigan, about 20 km away, and Ganges and Lodève, a little further. Montpellier is about 43 km away in a straight line, and the nearest airport is Montpellier-Méditerranée Airport (MPL), about 51 km away.

Cirque de Navacelles

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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