Rockfax France: Cote d'Azur

The cliffs along the sunny Côte d’Azur, and area just inland, offer some of the best sport climbing found anywhere. The most famous venue is the magnificent Verdon Gorge with it walls of perfect limestone but this is only one of many great crags in the area. To the west is the beautiful Calanques with its amazing landscape, plus the spectacular Sainte Victoire. There are some great venues around Toulon, the sunniest city in France, plus there is the popular winter venue of Chateauvert and the less well known Esterel and Chateaudouble areas. Add in Saint Jeannet, Gorges du Loup and a selection of cliffs in the Nice area and you begin to see what an amazing amount of climbing the area has to offer.
The crags included in the book are many and various; the gleaming white sheets of Sainte Victoire, the sunken valleys of Les Calanques, the gaping abyss of the Verdon Gorge, the rocky mountain of Saint-Jeannet, the hard sport of Châteauverte and Gorges du Loup and the jutting headland of La Turbie, all brilliant crags in their own different ways. Despite their excellence, many of these had rather slipped off climbers’ radar but the first edition of this book published in 2010 brought them back to the forefront.
This 2017 book is a minor update to the 2010 edition. It has been updated to the more modern Rockfax format, had a Top 50 added and includes QR codes for parking spots. There are some updates and corrections plus a few new routes added on some of the crags.