Glow up: Inside France’s under-the-radar volcanos on the ultimate field trip for lava lovers

Auvergne has never had much of a look-in with overseas visitors but the region’s tantalising topography deserves to be seen, discovers Lucy Shrimpton

Surveying the Chaine des Puys (Guy Christian / hemis.fr)

I’m waiting on a platform for an e-train destined for the summit of a volcano. The station’s got all the vibes of the Metro, my observation validated when a fellow passenger jests “Next stop Chatelet!”, alluding to Paris’s Oxford-Circus. The French kids around me, one can’t help but notice, are jumpier than your average school trippers, high on interpreting “dormant” and “active” as “Pssst! The mountain’s gonna explode any minute. Pass it on!” I smile (how cute!) yet my faux nonchalance is given away by a gently tapping foot; I suppose they could be right... right?

I’m on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region of France, somewhere in the Massif-Central highlands, which you’ll have heard of if you were paying attention to your Tricolore textbook. It’s not doing the region a disservice to say it’s often overlooked by visitors favouring Paris, the Med, Alps and Atlantic coast (north, south, east and west respectively – each a three-to-four-hour drive away). Which might go some way to explaining why so few people associate France with volcanoes.

Clermont-Ferrand with the Puy de Dome volcano in the background (Luc Olivier)