Gralhon

The covered passage of the sub-prefecture is one of several in Florac, running beneath the houses. You have just gone through the former town wall and now find yourself inside the medieval town. Besides the beautiful ancient plane trees (the oldest are 200 years old), you can see, at one end, the statue of Léon Boyer, who built the Garabit viaduct with Gustave Eiffel and died in 1883 in Panama, where he was working on the construction of the Canal; and at the other end, the temple (Protestant church) and the War Memorial.

In the 16th and17th centuries, a large number of religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants affected the Cévennes, bringing with them much destruction. After the Peace of Alais was signed by Richelieu and the Duke of Rohan in June 1629, Protestants retained the right to practise their religion, but their fortifications were razed. This included Florac's town walls. The house bearing this information panel is one of the town's oldest: its tower used to watch over Thérond Gate. It also stands at the crossroads of the former road linking Nîmes with Saint-Flour and the former road from Florac to Séverac via the Causse plateau.

Some vines still grow at the edges of paths or cling to trees and scrub; a few  people still make their own wine. But today it is an anecdotal activity. Florac was once encircled by grapevines growing on terraces, and every farmer made several hundred litres of wine. But in around 1945, rural flight and the arduousness of the work led to these vine arbours being abandoned. In 2003, two wine-growers moved to Ispagnac, and viticulture was reborn.

"Gralhon Manor owes its construction here to the presence of a flat area consisting of fairly soft marl – whose gently-sloping profile is well-suited to crop cultivation – and of a spring located just above the houses. The water re-emerges here, having gone through the Causses limestone and hit impermeable schist. Its name might come from the Occitan gral, the raven – the real raven, which nests in the cliffs of the Causse, and not the crow.” (P. Grime)

Monteils is the hamlet in which Louis Brutus Cazal was born and died. He was one of those primary school teachers who were nicknamed “black ravens of the Republic”. He called his daughters Léa Fraternité and Léa Liberté to express his republican sentiments, which were common to many Protestant families at the time. A poet and defender of the Occitan language, he wrote a collection of poems entitled Les Lozériens. From 1925 on, he devoted himself to tourism in the Cévennes and founded the Club Cévenol. His son, Aimé Cazal, laid out two important tourist sites: Bramabiau chasm and Dargilan cave.

After a small detour from the hamlet of
Salièges to the river Tarn, you will come across a spring of ferruginous water. For a long time, the ability to prevent (or cure) alcoholism was attributed to this water rich in Fe2+ ions, and made famous by a sketch by the stand-up comedian Bourvil. It supposedly supplies the iron that would normally come from regularly drinking alcohol. A small construction indicates the Salce spring (the path from Salièges is way-marked), as does the red tinting from iron oxide, which you find in many contact zones between schist and limestone.