Verdon Gorge

Few colours in European landscape are as startling as the Verdon's. The river runs a milky turquoise-green through the bottom of a limestone canyon up to 700 m deep and about 25 km long, and the name itself is said to come from that colour; the tint comes from fine rock flour and minerals suspended in the water. The gorge lies in Provence between Castellane and Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, marking for part of its length the boundary between the Var and the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, and it ends where the river spills into the artificial Lac de Sainte-Croix.

Its history is geological first. The limestone was laid down in warm Jurassic seas, lifted and fractured when the Alps rose, then scoured by glaciers and by meltwater torrents; the river kept cutting as the land rose. In places the walls stand only six metres apart at water level while the rims are more than a kilometre from each other. The gorge divides into a "pre-gorge" below Castellane, the deepest section to l'Imbut — where the Verdon disappears for a stretch under enormous fallen blocks — and a final canyon down to the Galetas bridge, where boats and kayaks glide in from the lake. Although described in print from the late eighteenth century, the gorge was first fully explored only in 1905 by the speleologist Édouard-Alfred Martel and his team, and it stayed little known outside France until the early twentieth century.

Martel's name is on the best walk: the Sentier Martel, laid out by the Touring Club de France in 1928, follows the river through tunnels and down iron ladders, among them the Échelles Imbert with their 252 steps. Other trails lead to l'Imbut and to lookout points on the rim. Roads run along both edges, with belvederes over drops of hundreds of metres, and the walls themselves are one of Europe's great climbing venues, with some 1,500 routes, many of them long multi-pitch climbs. The valley's dams are part of the story too: the village of Les Salles-sur-Verdon was drowned under the lake in 1973 and rebuilt higher up.

Getting there

Draguignan is about 24 km from the gorge; Toulon-Hyères Airport (TLN) is about 73 km away. The north rim is followed by the D952 between Castellane and Moustiers-Sainte-Marie; the south rim by the D71 via Aiguines, linking with the D90 and D955 towards Castellane. Kayaks can be rented to explore the river from the water.