The Gorges de Daluis: The Red Canyon of the Var

Required Activities

• Drive the gorge road through the wine-red pelite, stop where the walls close in, and put your hand on rock made of volcanic ash and fine sediment laid down more than 250 million years ago and oxidised red — the Var has cut more than 900 m down through it

• Park and walk out onto the Pont de la Mariée, now closed to traffic — one of the first reinforced-concrete bridges built in France, raised for the Pont de Gueydan to Guillaumes tramway that ran only from 1923 to 1929 — and look over the parapet where Marie-Louise Pion fell on 30 July 1927, a death the inquiry recorded as an accident and the valley has argued about ever since

• On the Point Sublime circuit, about an hour and a quarter from the road, look down the 300 m drops the locals call the Colorado niçois, then on the rock faces find the fossilised current ripples and the dimples left by raindrops that fell on this mud 250 million years ago

• On the red rock beside the path, look for the two snails named after it — the maillot des pélites and the marbrée des pélites — which live on this pelite and on no other rock anywhere

• From a pull-in on the gorge road, watch the cliffs and name whichever of the golden eagle, peregrine, short-toed snake eagle, eagle owl or wallcreeper you can pick out — the wallcreeper works the rock face itself