The area is home to a rich geological heritage spanning more than 600 million years. In addition to its efforts to preserve and showcase its geological heritage through its application for the UNESCO World Geopark label, a number of other sites have also been protected, including by classification as a Regional Nature Reserve.
The aim? To preserve and enhance this heritage through appropriate actions and measures.
- Understand how the RNR works
- Discover the Normandy RNR
- Discover the Pays de la Loire RNR
The Normandy-Maine Regional Geological Nature Reserve
The Normandy-Maine Geological Reserve is a multi-site reserve whose purpose is to protect a group of geological heritage sites that illustrate the 600-million-year history of the Park.
It was created in 2009 to protect the Vaux quarry site (in Saint-Hilaire-la-Gérard), where 443-million-year-old limestone can be found - it has no equivalent in France except on the Crozon peninsula.
Besides its rarity, this limestone has tiny conodont fossils in it. Remains of animals, now extinct, belonging to a lineage from which all vertebrates could be descended. Although not visible to the naked eye, these fossils make it possible to date the rock and build a picture of the environment at that time.
Two other sites are being considered for inclusion in the reserve: Les Pierres Plates (flat stone slabs) and the Allée Béatrix in the Bagnoles-de-l'Orne-Normandie commune. These are ancient seabeds of the Ordovician (470 million years) transformed today into Armorican sandstone where various animals (trilobites, lingulae...) have left their traces.
The Pierriers de Normandie – Regional Nature Reserve
Located in Bagnoles-de-l'Orne-Normandie, the Pierriers de Normandie Regional Nature Reserve was created in 2018 and aims to protect the screes located on the Normandie-Maine Park territory.
What is a scree slope? It is an accumulation of blocks of rocks (or scree), a legacy of the climatic variations on Earth over millions of years. It offers habitats favoured by mosses, lichens and micro-fauna.
The Roc au Chien, an emblematic scree that is part of the daily landscape for the Bagnoles residents, is the first scree to be integrated into this RNR... but certainly won’t be the last!
The Park's ambition, in the next 10 years, is to create a network of scree slopes and to define relevant actions to protect these rare environments in France.
A future Regional Nature Reserve in the Pays de la Loire Region?
Since 2022, a new mission aims to assess the feasibility of a geological RNR on the Park's Loire territory. This area is also home to a wealth of geological diversity:
- scree slopes that give the landscape a mountainous appearance;
- calderas testifying to volcanic episodes;
- limestone with fossils revealing the presence of an ancient sea.
This is why the creation of a multi-site geological reserve is currently being studied, with different sites illustrating the mechanisms and environments that led to the formation of the rocks and landscapes we see today.
The creation of this reserve would not only enable the preservation of heritage sites, but also raise public awareness of this heritage.
The first stage currently underway involves contacting the owners of the most emblematic sites.