France’s dramatic Grand Canyon where my family escapes summer heat and crowds

The French Riviera isn’t a place that flies under the radar. France’s southern shores have always attracted plenty of visitors. More than 12 million tourists visited the Côte d’Azur and Monaco in 2025, and Nice draws more visitors than any French city bar Paris.

I am one of the many visitors who have fallen in love with the Côte d’Azur and have now lived there for nearly 10 years. Our hillside home on Mont Boron sits between Nice and Villefranche-sur-Mer, fragrant pine forest above and the glistening Mediterranean below. I am obsessed with it. And in summer, I gladly bid it au revoir.

Daily life with a three- and five-year-old becomes fraught in heaving crowds, but there is somewhere to escape to, and not too far away.

One of my family’s best-loved summer retreats in this diverse region is a spectacular natural wonder, a few hours west. The Verdon Regional Natural Park stretches across 180,000 hectares in the very heart of Provence.

The headline act is Les Gorges du Verdon, Europe’s Grand Canyon: a chasm 21km long and up to 700m deep, gouged into the limestone over millennia by the Verdon River. The water’s striking turquoise colour comes from micro-algae and suspended limestone particles scattering the light.

Although hiking the full length of the Blanc-Martel trail is still on my bucket list, I have made it to Le Point Sublime, which lives up to its name as one of France’s most spectacular viewpoints.

This year we returned for the first time with children. I made the controversial decision to have everyone up and on the road for 8am. The gorges get busy in high summer; the key is to arrive early, by 9am or 9.30am.

We hired two pedalos with slides and set off across the turquoise expanse of Lac Sainte-Croix towards the mouth of the gorge. Inside, we swam beneath waterfalls and craned our necks at cliffs rising hundreds of metres overhead, past caves carved out long before written history. Fair warning: pedalling a canyon is a serious leg day.

We found Lac d’Esparron to be a quieter yet equally beautiful alternative to the better-known Sainte-Croix, although there is tourism infrastructure here. Verdon Croisières runs one-hour electric-boat cruises with French and English guiding, during which you might spot an eagle’s nest or the odd naturist sunbather (this is France, after all). Electric boats, pedalos and kayaks can be hired from the jetty at Esparron-de-Verdon.

Leading from the lake are the basses, or lower gorges – 9km of canyons that were the site of some of the region’s earliest human settlements.

The Museum of Prehistory in Quinson, whose entrance is guarded by a gigantic woolly mammoth, provides fascinating insight into how our ancestors lived. The museum’s prehistoric village faithfully replicates five habitats from various periods.

For our own shelter, we chose Verdon Parc, a five-star Eurocamp village near the Provençal town of Gréoux-les-Bains – about an hour from Marseille airport and two-and-a-half hours’ drive from Nice that makes a good base for exploring the gorge (lodges sleeping four from £1,424 in August).

It offers all-action family camping and glamping. Small children can dig and splash about in the sandy lagoon, and there are also large outdoor pools, a heated covered pool, waterslides and bike hire for all ages. A herd of goats and a friendly alpaca roam the adjacent field each morning before taking up residence in the mini farm.

Although we arrived during a heatwave (the mercury hit 38°C), our four-person chalets were, mercifully, air-conditioned and proved to be a cool sanctuary at the end of a hot day.

So, while the cameras and the crowds descend on the coast, we’ll be inland, wading in cool rivers and swimming under waterfalls, close to one of Europe’s great natural spectacles.