The Mercantour National Park in France is one of the seven national parks in France. With an average estimate of around 800,000 visitors every year, this park enjoys the privilege of being one of the famous National Parks in France. There are 28 villages in the Mercantour National Park in France. The protected area is spread across 685 square kilometres including seven valleys. These are Roya, Bevera, Vesubie, Tinee, Haut Var or Cians, Verdon and Ubaye. Sightseeing in France remains incomplete complete if you miss out this park.
The scenery in the Mercantour Park is really some of the best to find in France, and it is quite lovely to walk through the lower meadows and woodlands, or if you are more experienced to embark one of the most strenuous mountain tracks.
A National Park since 1979, the Mercantour mountain massif marks the extreme south western end of the great Alpine arc. Its foothills drop directly into the Mediterranean, and the eastern end of the massif straddles the border with Italy. A series of river valleys cut northwards into the mountain, the most westerly being the Var. Only a few of the alpine dairy herds survive, and the flocks of sheep that have replaced them are also dwindling. Millions of years ago, the compression and crushing of the limestone rock has now become what is known as the Alps, which is how the Mercantour comes to be 350 million year old granite.
Mercantour National Park can be approached from seven different valleys, each of which have a different character and provide a different experience for visitors. Depending on your idea of a vacation, you can enter from a quiet valley with few other winter visitors or a more popular area with ski-resort style nightlife. Best of all are the blue skies, mild temperatures and the 320 days of sunshine a year.
More than 2000 of the 4,200 flora species can be found in the Mercantour. With the Mediterranean climate of the lower valleys, a walk in the Daluis gorge has all the herbal scents of the garrigue. Higher up the valleys, the meadows are mixed with forests of larch which change in color with the season, from a luminous green in the summer to a rich red in the autumn. Here, the alpines are plentiful and over sixty types of orchids have been documented, but the most distinctive feature of the grasslands is the carpets of wild lavender at altitudes of 1000 to 1,500 meters.
The park is the home of chamois, Ibex (bouquet in), mountain goat (mouflon), as well as marmots, white hares and cattle. The symbolic flower of the Park du Mercantour was (until 1990) the Saxifrage de multifeuil (saxifraga floridenta).
Mar 7, 2011
| 
424 Views
