The first national park born in France, the Parc de la Vanoise, located between the high valleys of the Maurienne and the Tarentaise, is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The opportunity to tread the rock and get to know the peaks but also to pick up the thread of the sometimes eventful history of this Savoyard park.
Among the mountains crowned with snow or ice and wide pastoral valleys riddled with lakes and wild animals, a world in itself is revealed as you walk. This animal, mineral and plant world has been fully protected over 535 km2 since 1963 and represents a lair for a whole range of mountain fauna: ibexes, chamois, marmots, black grouse, foxes, owls, bearded vultures and golden eagles. It was initially to protect the ibex that the Parc de la Vanoise was born, a national park that was the founder in its own way of the ten others that would follow in France. He is also the founder of a certain public policy of nature conservation as well as the struggles and tensions that such a regulated natural space gives rise to over time. In Vanoise, there are 107 peaks, 52 refuges, 400 km of marked trails and 28 municipalities located in the peripheral zone of the Park. And every year, more than 500,000 nature and walking enthusiasts visit it. After the Cévennes, the Calanques, Guyana or Port Cros, new episode of our series of trips through the French national parks.
A report by Raphaëlle Constant.
Learn more :
– On the Savoie-Mont Blanc destination
– On the fauna, flora and fungus of the Park which is home to more than 7,000 species (fauna, flora, fungus)
– On the so-called Vanoise affair (1969-1971)
– On biodiversity in Savoie.