Half the region is mountain and eight in ten of its inhabitants live on the coast.

The name says it and almost nobody hears it. Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur lists three things, and two of them are inland. The Alps get the same billing as the Riviera, except that the Riviera is a line and the Alps are a volume.

01 From the shore to 4,102 metres

The region covers 31,400 square kilometres across six departments, and its relief is organised by height far more than by distance. At the low end, sea level. At the high end, the Barre des Écrins, 4,102 metres, the only French four-thousander that lies entirely outside the Mont Blanc massif.

The Écrins national park that surrounds it gathers around a hundred and fifty summits above 3,000 metres. This is high mountain without qualification: glaciers, refuges, a short season. And it is roughly three hours by car from the coast.

02 Everyone fits on the strip

Mountain occupies half of the regional territory. The population does exactly the opposite: 80% live along the coast, that is, on a band of some 700 kilometres of shoreline that in many stretches is only a few kilometres deep before the ground starts to climb.

The region's average density is 166 inhabitants per square kilometre, a figure that means little because it averages two different worlds. Split the same population between the coastal half and the alpine half and you get an almost continuous conurbation on one side and valleys of a few thousand people on the other.

03 Four national parks out of eleven

France has eleven national parks. Four of them are in this region: the Écrins, the Mercantour, Port-Cros and the Calanques. No other French region holds as many, and the reason is the one already seen: high mountain, rocky shore and Mediterranean archipelago all fit inside it.

The two marine ones are edge cases. Port-Cros, created in December 1963, was the first national park in Europe to protect land and sea together. The Calanques, created in 2012, is Europe's first peri-urban national park: its core areas border a metropolis of more than a million people.

On top of that there are eight regional natural parks, four of them adjoining one another. They are a different legal instrument and a different level of protection, but they say the same thing: the surface left outside the coastal strip is so large and so varied that it has taken layers to cover it.

04 Fifty kilometres between snow and sea

The Mercantour sums up the region's geometry best. Its highest summit, the Cime du Gélas, stands at 3,143 metres and lies some fifty kilometres from the Mediterranean in a straight line. There is no forecourt: high mountain starts almost on top of the beach.

That proximity is what sustains the cliché of skiing in the morning and swimming in the afternoon. The cliché is true in kilometres and misleading in hours: the distance is short, but it is covered on valley roads that climb in switchbacks and never allow a high average speed. Fifty kilometres as the crow flies become ninety by road and close to an hour and a half of driving.

05 What this changes for the traveller

The first consequence is about planning. In this region distance does not predict time. A small-scale map suggests half-hour hops between points that are in fact separated by a mountain pass, and the mistake is paid for in full the same day.

The second is about expectations. Anyone who books on the coast and plans day trips inland finds that each outing eats a whole day. Anyone who inverts the arrangement and sleeps inland finds the opposite: the coast is a reasonable drive away and everything else is on the doorstep.

The third is about the calendar, and it is the hardest. The alpine half of the region has a season. High passes close under snow, refuges open for a few weeks, and the northern valleys run on a different timetable from the coast. The seaside strip tolerates improvisation almost year-round. The other half does not.