HIKING

With its 1000 km of marked trails, the Ubaye Serre-Ponçon Valley is an inexhaustible playground for hiking.
Leaning against the border of Italian Piémont, with which it shares nearly 33 km of peaks, the Mercantour massif is the last promontory of the Alpine arc to the south, before its brutal plunge into the Mediterranean Sea. At the top of Gélas, the highest peak in the Mercantour at 3,143 m above sea level, you are only 50 km from the sea as the crow flies!

It has two large massifs separated by the Tinée axis: to the northwest a limestone or schistose massif, to the southeast the crystalline massif shared with the Argentera. With a length of 150 km, the territory extends over six valleys in the Southern Alps and covers two departments: the Alpes-Maritimes, for about two thirds of its surface, and the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Verdon, Var-Cians, Ubaye, Tinée, Vésubie and Roya-Bévéra, each valley has its own distinct character!

Located at the crossroads of multiple climatic, geological and altitudinal influences, the Mercantour National Park is made up of a mosaic of natural environments whose extreme diversity explains the exceptional richness of fauna and flora.