Plan your visit
La Dalle à Ammonites is one of France’s great natural sites — bring good shoes and a camera. Locate it on the map, book a room nearby in a click, or add it to your travel list to build your itinerary.
About La Dalle à Ammonites
Just outside Digne-les-Bains in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, the Dalle aux Ammonites is one of the most extraordinary fossil sites in Europe — a great sloping slab of grey limestone, tilted up by the folding of the Alps, covered with more than fifteen hundred coiled ammonites turned to stone some two hundred million years ago. Once the muddy floor of a warm Jurassic sea, the rock now displays these spiral shells, some the size of dinner plates, in breathtaking profusion across its surface. Part of the UNESCO Geopark of Haute-Provence, the site can be admired for free beside the road and is a place of pilgrimage for geologists and curious travellers alike. Astonishing, free and deeply humbling, the Dalle aux Ammonites is an open-air window onto the deep history of the Earth.