Lac Pavin

Besse-et-Saint-Anastaise

Lac Pavin is France's youngest crater lake: a maar born some 6,900 years ago when magma met a water table, almost perfectly circular and ringed by wooded cliffs. Its name comes from the northern Occitan "lac Pavent," from the Latin pavens, "dreadful": local tradition nicknamed it the devil's lake. Accounts collected in the 19th century tell that a town once stood on this spot and was swallowed up as punishment for its inhabitants' behaviour; on a clear day, people claimed to glimpse the bell tower of the cursed town in the depths. Another version features a lord named Roupoutou, or the devil depending on the variant, spurned by a young woman of Besse, who sat on the "devil's chair" and wept until the village was flooded. The most persistent belief holds that a stone thrown into the middle of the lake "wakes" it and triggers a storm, and that at midnight the bells of the drowned church can be heard ringing. The lake is well stratified, and its deep, anoxic waters concentrate CO2, methane and hydrogen sulphide between 60 and 92 m; scientists have therefore looked for traces of an ancient limnic eruption there. Some researchers have proposed a gas release event or a landslide around 1270 that could have fed the legend, but the Magmas et Volcans laboratory judged the evidence insufficient, and historians point out that Besse was thriving in the Middle Ages. Today, monitoring shows the lake has not reached saturation: the danger remains theoretical, and the mystery of Pavin lies mainly in this meeting between a genuinely unusual geology and an imagination steeped in curses.

Lac Pavin — Wikipédia ↗

Getting there : From Besse-et-Saint-Anastaise, take the D978 toward Super-Besse: car park by the lake. A roughly 2.7 km loop path runs beneath the beech woods, with several viewpoints. Swimming is strictly forbidden and dangerous.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound