OFFICE DE TOURISME DE LA VALLEE DE LA ROANNE

It is a valley that, curiously, enjoys growing popularity while remaining virtually unknown. Its popularity, it owes it to its torrent, the Roanne which conquered in a few years an enthusiastic and growing public for swimming. While the Valentinois have grown more and more in summer, the holidaymakers are not left, primarily the Dutch who know the country as their pocket with numerous guides, journal articles and TV spots that boast the charms of the Diois and especially its rivers, Drôme and Roanne in the lead. Result: in the heart of the summer, too high a turnout with consequences detrimental to the cleanliness of the banks and the quality of water downstream. It is a real problem that the mutation of this tourism, which is initially mild, becomes aggressive on the natural environment and on a magnificent site, victim at certain short periods of the year of pure and hard mass tourism. Well, there is much to bet that the vast majority of bathers know Roanne only what they see from their cars, along the small road that leads them to their favourite parking place, then to their favourite road to access to the Roanne and to the favourite water hole in which they are used to dipping.

And yet! What some wonders to discover in this valley! The landscape of course: an entangled valley tangle, tortured, fragmented, doe, medium mountain summits dominated by Servelle-de-Brette - 1 613 m - to the east, Angèle mountain - 1 606 m - to the south and the mountain of Couspeau - 1 544 m - to the west, vast pastoral areas, a very loose nursery of beautiful hamlets and villages among which Saint-Benoît, Aucelon, Volvent, Saint-Nazaire-le-Desert. Some of the hamlets crossing or around are almost empty. There are bare slopes filled with lavender, others are covered with black pine trees in Austria, in the campaigns for the reforestation of mountain land. In this dry world that the little gem that is Roanne that grows the waters of 4 or 5 tributaries. Then mingled between waves of limestone, in the captured gorges where the picturesque never dément, the torrent assagit by joining the valley of Drôme. This is the unknown country of the Roanne, a secret retreat from the Diois at the gates of the Baronnies.