How to get lost in… Cantal

Détour n°XV — Blueberry pies, wild trout and gliders

From any major French city, it’s often quicker to fly to Berlin or Madrid than to reach the foothills of the Cantal. There are no direct trains from Paris. No highway. Few - if any - towns. This isolation has made it one of the most unspoiled regions in the country, both architecturally and environmentally.

The volcanic land draws perfect lines, sometimes gentle, sometimes rugged. Sweeping vistas, fast-moving rivers, lush pastures inhabited by sturdy cows and heavy-hoofed draft horses. Around a bend, you enter mushroom-filled forests, only to emerge onto high plateaus dotted with huts where cheese is made and lakes that shimmer like mirrors. A kind of green, basalt western.

Here, the land feels almost uninhabited. You can walk for miles without seeing another soul, let your gaze wander without interruption, and greet difference with a renewed sense of trust. It’s a place you need to earn, maybe more than others. You need to cross it on foot or by bike to grasp its scale. And when you do, as the writer Marie-Hélène Lafon puts it, it stirs “a sense of elation, a physical lightness, a joyful and calming, nourishing contiguity between the earth you tread and the oiled body that moves, that walks. It’s deeply exhilarating.”

Born in the Cantal, Lafon also speaks of the island-like feeling that clings to these mountains: “The word ‘mountain,’ for me, has always had, in a very physical, organic way, something to do with a fundamental insularity.” The Cantal feels like an island.

How can I explain it to you without photos? The Cantal is at once the Faroe Islands and the Dakotas. A land cherished by lovers of aligot and vernacular heritage, a singular, extraordinary region.

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