Puy de Dôme

Puy de Dôme is a lava dome and one of the youngest volcanoes of the Chaîne des Puys, a chain of cinder cones, lava domes and maars in the Massif Central, remarkable for sitting far from the edge of any tectonic plate. The dome was formed by a Peléan eruption some 10,700 years ago and stands about ten kilometres from Clermont-Ferrand; the Puy-de-Dôme department takes its name from it. A rack railway and a footpath both reach the summit, and from the top the whole chain of cones lines up to the north and south.