Auvergne

Auvergne is the France nobody puts on a postcard, and that is exactly its appeal. This is the volcanic heart of the country — the Massif Central, a chain of extinct cones called the Chaîne des Puys rolling out in every direction, green and improbably quiet. There is no coastline here, no Michelin-starred hype, just black basalt villages, cheese that could anchor a meal on its own, and a landscape that looks more like Iceland than the France of the guidebooks.

Clermont-Ferrand, built almost entirely from the black volcanic stone of the puys around it, anchors the region with a cathedral that looks like it grew out of the ground rather than being built on top of it. To the south, the pilgrimage town of Le Puy-en-Velay stacks its chapel on a spire of volcanic rock so improbably vertical that photographs of it look retouched. The black-roofed village of Salers, one of France’s officially designated most beautiful, sits on a plateau of pastureland that produces the cheese of the same name, while Besse-et-Saint-Anastaise, a medieval town built from the same dark stone, guards the approach to the Sancy massif — the highest point in the Massif Central. Further south, the Romanesque pilgrimage village of Conques appears out of the hills with a UNESCO-listed abbey that has drawn walkers on the Camino de Santiago for a thousand years.

When to go: June through September for hiking the puys and the Sancy massif; early autumn if you want the beech forests turning without the summer walkers. Winter closes much of the high country but brings its own version of quiet to the black-stone towns below.