Le Mont-Dore

Le Mont-Dore sits in a narrow valley directly beneath the Puy de Sancy, the highest point in the Massif Central and, depending on how you count, the highest point in France outside the Alps and Pyrenees, and the town has built its entire identity around the two things that mountain offers: hiking and skiing above, and hot mineral water below. The Romans knew about the springs here — archaeological remains under the current Établissement Thermal date the site’s use back nearly two thousand years — and the town that grew up around them still smells faintly of the sulphur and warm stone that make thermal towns in this region so distinctive.

Up to the roof of central France

A cable car, the funiculaire du Sancy, runs from just outside town most of the way up the slope, cutting a good chunk of elevation off what would otherwise be a serious climb, and from the top station it’s a manageable hour or so of hiking to the summit of the Puy de Sancy at 1,886 meters. We went up on a clear late-June morning and the view from the top genuinely surprised me — the entire Chaîne des Puys stretching north in a chain of green volcanic cones, and on the clearest days, they say you can see as far as the Alps, though we settled for the more modest but still spectacular view of Auvergne’s own volcanic country laid out below us.

Soaking it off afterward

Back down in town, the Établissement Thermal is a grand nineteenth-century building of stone and ironwork, still operating as a working spa offering treatments for respiratory conditions using the naturally warm, mineral-rich water that rises here, and while we didn’t book the full medical cure that brings in regular thermal patients every season, a shorter relaxation session in the warm pools after a morning of hiking felt like exactly the right way to end the day. In winter the town flips identity entirely, becoming a modest but genuine ski resort with pistes running down from the same slopes we’d hiked in summer, which says something about how thoroughly this valley has organized itself around its mountain.

When to go: July and August for hiking the Puy de Sancy in full daylight and warm weather, or December through March if skiing and the thermal baths together sound like a better combination than a summer trail.