Puy de Dôme
Puy de Dôme is a lava dome and one of the youngest volcanoes in the Chaîne des Puys region of Massif Central in central France. This chain of volcanoes including numerous cinder cones, lava domes and maars is far from the edge of any tectonic plate.
Puy de Dôme was created by a Peléan eruption, some 10,700 years ago. It is approximately from Clermont-Ferrand. The Puy-de-Dôme Departments of France is named after the volcano.
History
In pre-Christian Europe, Puy de Dôme was an assembly place for spiritual ceremonies. Temples were built at the summit, including a Gallo-Roman temple of Mercury, the ruins of which were discovered in 1872.In 1648,, at the urging of his brother-in-law Blaise Pascal, confirmed Evangelista Torricelli's theory that barometric observations were caused by the weight of air by measuring the height of a column of mercury at three elevations on Puy de Dôme.
In 1875, a physics laboratory was built at the summit. Since 1956, a TDF antenna is also located there.
Tourism
A UNESCO World Heritage site since 2018, the Puy de Dôme is one of the most visited sites in the Auvergne region, attracting nearly 500,000 visitors a year. The summit offers expansive views of the Chaîne des Puys and Clermont-Ferrand. It is a well-known centre for paragliding.The summit can be reached by two pedestrian paths. The southern one, Le sentier des muletiers, was formerly a Roman road. The northern one, Le sentier des chèvres, runs past the Nid de la Poule (Hen's Nest\
Geological heritage site
In respect of its key role in the development of volcanology as a geoscience discipline, the Puy-de-Dôme and Petite-Puy-de-Dôme volcanoes were included by the International Union of Geological Sciences in its assemblage of 100 "geological heritage sites" around the world in a listing published in October 2022.Sport
Cycling
In more recent times, Puy de Dôme has served as an occasional stage finish in the Tour de France. It was here that in 1964 Raymond Poulidor battled with Jacques Anquetil in one of the race's most famous moments, racing side by side up almost the entire climb; and that in 1975 Eddy Merckx was punched in the kidney by a spectator.Between the 1988 and 2023 Tour de France summit finishes, only the first part of the ascent to the Col de Ceyssat was covered in the 13th stage of the 2020 Tour de France. The 2012 construction of the Puy de Dôme rack railway narrowed the already very narrow road to the top. Because of the increasing logistical demands of the Tour, many thought that the Tour would never return after 1988 but the 9th stage of the 2023 Tour de France had a summit finish, which was won by Michael Woods. However, spectators were not permitted on the climb.
The road is open to cyclists only during very limited periods when other vehicles are prohibited. In 2006 this was 7–9am on Wednesdays and Sundays between 1 May and 30 September. In 2017, it was the first checkpoint in the Transcontinental Race, a nonstop, unsupported bicycle race across Europe.