The Verdon Gorge

Castellane sits at the upstream end of the story, where the Verdon leaves open valley and turns into the limestone. It is a small place — among the least-peopled seats of local government in France — set beneath a tall pale rock that is the same limestone the canyon will later stand on end. Here the river still has room. It runs broad and unhurried through the town, nothing like the green thread pinched between cliffs a few miles downstream. That contrast is the reason to start here. Everything the canyon does to the Verdon — narrowing it, deepening it, hiding it in shadow — is easiest to understand if you have first seen the river with room to spread. Look upstream and down from the bridges in town and you are looking at the same water before and after it goes to work on the rock.

Moustiers-Sainte-Marie is built into a break in the limestone at the canyon’s western edge, where the plateau country gives way to the lake. The town sits at the point where the gorge’s walls step back and the country opens toward open water. From the upper part of town you look out over the mouth of the canyon country and the lake beyond, the whole western gateway of the gorge laid out below.

La Palud-sur-Verdon is the small village at the top of the northern wall, and the base for the rim road that runs out to the belvederes over the deepest part of the gorge. This is where you meet the canyon from above, looking straight down the pale cliffs to the green river far below. From the rim the Verdon is reduced to a thread, and its scale only registers when you realise the whole drop — several hundred metres of wall — happened because the river never stopped cutting downward. Trace the river along its length from an overlook and you will see it does not run straight. It swings from one side of the canyon to the other in long bends, and each bend marks a place where the water leaned into one wall and cut sideways as well as down. The overlooks are spaced along the rim; move between two or three and the canyon turns from a picture into a length of river you can follow.

The Pont de l’Artuby carries the southern rim road across the Artuby, a tributary that joins the Verdon nearby. It is a two-lane road bridge over a deep, narrow side gorge, and from the middle of the span you look straight down into a slot the smaller river has cut for itself. The bridge earns its place in this note by repeating the main story at a scale you can stand directly above. The Artuby is a lesser river than the Verdon, but it has done the same thing — found a line in the same Jurassic limestone and cut straight down, leaving walls far taller than the stream is wide. Standing at mid-span, with the side canyon dropping away beneath your feet, you get the clearest possible feeling for what cutting down really means: not a gentle valley but a clean vertical slot, quarried by nothing more than moving water and time.

Canjuers is the dry limestone plateau that spreads above the gorge’s southern rim — the high, flat country the river has been cutting down from all along. Much of the plateau is a military camp and closed to entry, but the southern rim road runs along its edge, and from there you can read the upland for what it is: a broad, waterless surface of pale stone. That dryness is the point. Limestone dissolves slowly in rain, and over time the plateau has become riddled with cracks and hollows, so water does not run across it. Rain sinks straight in and travels underground, surfacing far below as the springs that feed the canyon. The plateau is the before elevation, the level the land once stood at everywhere here; the gorge is simply how far the Verdon has managed to cut beneath it. Seeing the flat top and the deep slot in one view is the whole story of the place in a single frame.