Chaîne des Puys – Limagne Fault

The property Chaîne des Puys - Limagne fault tectonic arena was inscribed on the World Heritage List in July 2018 and extends along an axis of some 32 kilometres from north to south and 4 wide, west of Clermont-Ferrand, within the Volcans d'Auvergne regional nature park.

What is protected are two inseparable elements. On the one hand, the eighty volcanoes of the Chaîne des Puys, between 8,400 and 95,000 years old, among them the Puy de Dôme, which at 1,465 metres gives the department its name, and the Puy de Pariou, with its characteristic Strombolian crater. On the other, the Limagne fault, some 35 million years old and reaching three thousand metres deep at some points.

UNESCO inscribed it because it illustrates exceptionally well the phenomenon of continental break-up, or rifting, one of the five main stages of plate tectonics: here one can see how the Earth's crust fractured and subsided, letting magmas rise and lifting the surface massively. The legibility of the whole is such that the volcanologist Haroun Tazieff came to admit that he would have gained years of his career had he studied these volcanoes before travelling the continents. It was France's fourth natural property and the first on the French mainland.