The Verdon Gorge is a canyon up to 700 metres deep in the limestone of Provence, in southern France, where a river of turquoise water runs for twenty-five kilometres between sheer walls, paddled at the bottom, driven along the top, and climbed on the rock where sport climbing was born. The river is the Verdon, and its colour comes from the glacial minerals it carries down from the Alps; it runs out at the western end of the canyon into Lake Sainte-Croix, a turquoise sheet that is not natural at all but a reservoir made in the 1970s, which drowned a whole village when the valley was dammed. From the beaches at that end canoes, kayaks and pedal boats are hired by the hour and paddled up into the gorge, with the water so clear that the boat seems to float on air. The Route des Crêtes traces the southern rim in a one-way loop of belvederes where the canyon drops hundreds of metres beneath your feet at each turn and griffon vultures, gone from the Verdon for most of a century and brought back on purpose, ride the updrafts at eye level.
The floor is walked on the Sentier Martel, the canyon's famous footpath, a fifteen-kilometre day down past sculpted pools and sheer walls, through steel ladders bolted to the rock and a long unlit tunnel, that feels like an expedition and needs a torch. The walls are the other life of the place. François Guillot opened the gorge's first great multi-pitch route, La Demande, in 1968, and through the decade that followed the limestone was bolted from the top down, so that the Verdon became the birthplace of sport climbing, with routes of hundreds of metres dropping straight toward the river. The Pont de l'Artuby, a slender arch over a side gorge, looks 182 metres straight down to the riverbed, and is one of the highest bungee platforms in Europe. The Verdon is a crack in Provence with a turquoise floor, and the walls on either side taught the world to climb.