Chaos de Montpellier-le-Vieux

The rock city has no inhabitants. Dolomite towers, arches, corridors and chambers spread over a hundred and twenty hectares of the Causse Noir, eroded into forms so architectural they look built — doorways, walls, windows — by nothing more intentional than water and wind. Montpellier-le-Vieux is a natural labyrinth on a limestone plateau in southern France, where geology imitates civilisation and the silence imitates abandonment.

The chaos stands on the Causse Noir above the gorges of the Dourbie, one of the Grands Causses, the high, empty limestone plateaux of the Aveyron, and its dolomite has weathered over millions of years into a stone city that shepherds long avoided and that Édouard-Alfred Martel mapped in 1883, giving the formations the names they still carry — the Sphinx, the Elephant, the City Gate, the Gate of Mycenae. Waymarked paths loop through it at every length, a little train runs the long way round for those who want it, and the site has strung via ferrata and zip lines across the towers, so that you can clip to the cable and cross the gaps between the rocks above the void. Outside the labyrinth the causse is sheep, wind and box scrub to the horizon, so the rock city feels like the only event for miles. The site is seasonal and ticketed; check the opening dates before the drive up.