Cévennes

Declared in 1970, it is the only national park in France with a significant permanent population within its boundaries, a reflection of centuries of farming and herding. The region was the setting of the Camisard revolt (1702-1704), a Protestant uprising after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which pitted barely 3,000 armed Huguenots against 30,000 royal troops. A century later the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson walked the region with his donkey Modestine, a journey he recounted in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) and which thousands of walkers now retrace each year on the GR70 long-distance path named after him.