Scandola Nature Reserve
France
Scandola is the red-rock peninsula on the west coast of Corsica, and the reserve is closed to walkers and to anchoring,…
17 tickets & tours
Country
Best national parks in France
France has eleven national parks, several of them overseas, and around sixty regional nature parks, which are inhabited landscapes with a charter rather than wilderness. The alpine parks, Vanoise, Ecrins and Mercantour, were created from the 1960s onward, are free to enter and are for walkers: the GR trails cross them from hut to hut, and the ibex of the Vanoise are shared with Italy’s Gran Paradiso next door. The Pyrenees park holds the Cirque de Gavarnie, and the Cevennes is the one park with a resident farming population.
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Réunion National Park
France
The national park covers the mountainous interior of Réunion, the French island in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar,…
15 tickets & tours
Camargue Regional Natural Park
France
The Camargue is the Rhône delta south of Arles, an hour from Avignon and Montpellier, and its regional park is visited…
14 tickets & tours
Verdon Regional Natural Park
France
The Verdon gorge is the deepest and most spectacular river canyon in France, in the hills of Haute-Provence between the…
4 tickets & tours
Port-Cros National Park
France
Port-Cros is one of the three Îles d'Hyères, the Golden Isles, off the coast of the Var between Toulon and…
3 tickets & tours
Alpilles Regional Natural Park
France
The Alpilles are a small range of jagged white limestone hills in the heart of Provence, rising abruptly from the plain…
2 tickets & tours
Bouches de Bonifacio Nature Reserve
France
The nature reserve of the Bouches de Bonifacio covers the waters, islands and coast of the extreme south of Corsica, on…
1 ticket or tour
Luberon Regional Nature Park
France
The Luberon is a range of wooded limestone hills in the heart of Provence, in the south of France, running east and…
1 ticket or tour
Cevennes National Park
France
The Cevennes are the rugged south-eastern edge of the Massif Central, in the south of France, a country of granite…
No online ticket
Ecrins National Park
France
The Ecrins is the great high-mountain park of the French Alps, a compact, savage massif of glaciers and granite peaks…
No online ticket
Mercantour National Park
France
The Mercantour is the southernmost of the great massifs of the French Alps, a wall of peaks along the Italian frontier…
No online ticket
Pyrenees National Park
France
The Pyrenees National Park is a long, narrow strip of high mountain running for a hundred kilometres along the French…
No online ticket
Vanoise National Park
France
The Vanoise is a high massif in Savoy, in the French Alps, lying between the two great valleys of the Tarentaise, to…
No online ticket
What is sold as tours is mostly in the south. The Verdon gorge, Europe’s deepest, is visited by road, kayak and pedal boat from Nice and Aix; the Camargue by jeep and on horseback for its flamingos and white horses; the Luberon and the Alpilles for hill villages and lavender in late June and July. At sea, Port-Cros is an island park off Hyeres, and in Corsica the Scandola reserve and the Bonifacio strait are seen only by boat, from Porto, Calvi and Bonifacio.
Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, has a park covering its volcanic interior, with the Piton de la Fournaise among the most active volcanoes on earth and three cirques reached on foot or by helicopter.