The Vallée des Merveilles: Thirty-Six Thousand Engravings Around Mont Bégo

Required Activities

• Walk the GR52 up into the Vallée des Merveilles, above 2,000 m, and find the engravings on the roches moutonnées beside the path — you may not step off the GR52 into the protected sectors unless you are with an accredited guide, so book one if you want to see the rest — and at the Paroi vitrifiée, the great glacier-polished wall in the Merveilles sector, pick out the densest panel of incised marks on the site

• Work along the panels naming what you find as you go: corniformes, the horned figures that outnumber everything else; the weapons — daggers, halberds, axes; the araires, ploughs drawn by yoked animals, which prove these were farmers and not only herders; and the réticulés, the grids read as fields or stock pens. Then tell the two techniques apart: the older pecked engravings, made by knocking out cupules, against the later incised lines cut in a V.

• Start at the Musée départemental des Merveilles in Tende, as the archaeologists working on the site recommend, and find the chef de tribu — not a cast but the engraved rock itself, lifted off the mountain by helicopter in 1988 to save it from vandalism and frost — then go up the valley knowing what you are looking at

• Cross to Fontanalba, the second of the two rich sectors at 486 hectares against the Merveilles' 972, and on a guided visit find the panel known as the Arbre de vie — the one figure on the mountain that nobody has been able to explain