The Verdon in numbers

About 700 metres at its most vertiginous point, beneath the Dent d’Aire, on the Route des Crêtes — it is the deepest canyon in France, over a length of about 25 km between Rougon and Lake Sainte-Croix. The detail, with the viewpoints from which to see it, is on our page dedicated to the Verdon Grand Canyon.

Because few sites cite their source. The figures we publish here — 760 million m³ (760 hm³), about 80 m of maximum depth — come from our own pages, already verified, on the lake and its dam, the depth coming from the official sheet of the Agence de l’Eau Rhône-Méditerranée-Corse (75 m measured, 83 m theoretical). Elsewhere on the web you sometimes find markedly higher figures for the lake’s capacity (up to 14 billion m³ announced, about 18 times more), without any source being cited. We prefer to publish fewer figures, but each one linked to its source.

At the nearest reference weather station, Saint-Auban (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), the official Météo-France normals for the 1991-2020 period record about 2,780 hours of sunshine a year. No station with public sunshine normals exists in Castellane itself: we therefore cite the nearest official station, saying so, rather than attributing an unsourced figure to the canyon.

The cliff rock — an Upper Jurassic limestone — formed about 150 to 135 million years ago, at the bottom of a tropical coral sea. The canyon itself is much younger: it was carved for the most part during the last two million years (the Quaternary), by the Verdon river swollen with glacial meltwater. Two very different ages for a single cliff face: the detail is on our page dedicated to the geology of the Verdon.

More than 300 individuals, including around a hundred breeding pairs — descendants of the reintroduction programme launched at Rougon in 1999, when the species had been absent from Provence for more than a century. All four vulture species of Europe now visit the canyon, a rare fact on this scale. Where and when to watch them: our page dedicated to the vultures of the Verdon.

From our own pages already verified in the field (canyon, lake, geology, vultures), and from a handful of external authorities cited explicitly below — Météo-France, the BRGM, the Haute-Provence UNESCO Geopark, the LPO PACA. Each figure is dated and linked to its source; when we have not found a figure solid enough to stand behind (as was the case, until now, for sunshine), we prefer to publish nothing rather than invent a precision we do not have. Our full method is explained on the dedicated page.