The Travassac walls

Among the trees, enigmatic lines emerge. From the top, it looks almost like a canyon: slate walls carved by centuries of man’s work.
To understand the origins of these places, we need to go back billions of years, to when the earth was first formed.

In the 17th century, farmers discovered this slate deposit. They dig vertically. Mining lasted almost 400 years.
Now, visitors can make their way to a place where minerals and plants come together. They pass through what are known as “perses”, holes dug in the past for the passage of wagons, and enter a shaft almost 30 metres deep.

Travassac slate is renowned for its strength and the beauty of its colors. It covers a large number of major buildings in the Limousin region, as well as national historic monuments such as the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel and the Sacré-Coeur church in Rodez.

This fantastic and impressive site has been back in operation for some fifteen years and is now a heritage site open to the public. A safe, guided tour of around 1 hour will show you this unique place in Europe, where metal footbridges and belvederes overlook man-made canyons carved by human hands, providing vertiginous sensations.