Le Puy-en-Velay

Three volcanic plugs rise from the town like fingers pointing at different heavens — one holds a Romanesque chapel, one a cathedral, one a giant red Madonna cast from cannon captured at Sevastopol. Le Puy-en-Velay, in France's Auvergne, is a town built on eruptions, geological and spiritual: pilgrims have gathered at the cathedral for a thousand years, and the road to Santiago still begins here every morning at dawn.

Le Puy sits in a basin of the Haute-Loire where the old volcanoes left their cores standing, and the town climbs them. The chapel of Saint-Michel d'Aiguilhe balances on a basalt needle, reached by 268 steps cut into the rock, a Romanesque jewel a thousand years old; the cathedral of Notre-Dame, dark and Byzantine-looking, stands at the top of a long flight of steps and is the starting point of the Via Podiensis, the oldest of the French roads to Compostela, so that the pilgrims' blessing each morning sends walkers off with packs and sticks; and on the Rocher Corneille the red iron statue of Notre-Dame de France, cast in 1860 from Russian guns taken at Sevastopol, looks down on the lot. The town's other fame is its green lentil — small, dark, peppery, the first vegetable in France to win an appellation — and the Velay's verbena liqueur, bright green and herbal, closes every meal.