Port-Cros National Park

Marceline Henry, who owned the western part of Port-Cros, gave almost all of her estate to the French state, 213 hectares, and the national park was created on 14 December 1963 with the support of André Malraux. Between the two world wars the island was a literary hub, linked to Saint-John Perse, Supervielle, Paulhan, Gide and Valéry.

In the 1630s Richelieu decided to protect the island against Barbary pirates by building three works:

• the Tour de l’Éminence;
• the fort de l’Estissac;
• the fort de Port-Man.

The island has also kept the fortin de la Vigie and the fort du Moulin, and historic sites such as the vallon de la Solitude and the manoir d’Hélène.

From one island to 138,000 hectares of land and sea

Porquerolles has been managed by the park since 1971 and became a core of the national park with the reform of 2012. The park is now made of three layers:

• Two cores: the island of Port-Cros and the natural areas of Porquerolles, each with a marine strip reaching 1,969 ft from the shore.
• An area of adhesion of 11,191 ha spread over five communes: Hyères, La Croix-Valmer, Le Pradet, Ramatuelle and La Garde.
• An adjacent marine area of 123,000 ha, running from La Garde to Ramatuelle and up to 3 nautical miles south of the islands.

About 350 people live year-round in the cores, against 99,000 in the area of adhesion. The park’s seat is in the garden of the Castel Sainte-Claire at Hyères.

Three islets off Port-Cros, Bagaud, la Gabinière and the rocher du Rascas, form an integral reserve of more than 61 ha created in May 2007: nobody may set foot there outside authorised scientific work.

The Îles d’Or (Golden Isles), an offshore piece of the Maures

Porquerolles, Port-Cros and the Levant extend the massif des Maures out to sea; rising waters cut them off from the mainland some 20,000 years ago. The two park islands differ:

• Porquerolles: 1,257 ha, about 4.3 mi long and 1.9 mi wide, five chains of wooded hills and long beaches of fine sand. It is the most inhabited and most farmed of the islands.
• Port-Cros: 700 ha and 2.8 mi by 2.2 mi, the smallest of the three, a mountainous island covered in dense forest.

The park also runs the Conservatoire botanique national méditerranéen on Porquerolles, and inventories count 602 land plant species and 500 species of algae in the park.

Groupers, Posidonia and the Pelagos sanctuary

The park sums itself up as the place where the grouper is king and the Posidonia flowers: this seagrass forms vast underwater meadows. The marine inventories, given as indicative because they are still in progress, list:

• 180 species of fish;
• 265 of crustaceans and 173 of molluscs;
• 92 of sponges and 53 of echinoderms;
• 3 of marine reptiles and 8 of cetaceans.

On land the figures are smaller: 12 mammal species, 7 of them bats, 177 bird species of which 26 nest, 6 reptiles and 2 amphibians. Two of them are endemic to the Îles d’Or, the European leaf-toed gecko and the Tyrrhenian painted frog. The booted eagle, the yellow-legged gull and the peregrine falcon nest on Port-Cros. Winter mimosa and water hyacinth, two invasive species, are followed by the ALIEM programme.

At sea the park carries several international roles:

1. 1999: it starts coordinating the French part of the Pelagos sanctuary for marine mammals, shared by France, Monaco and Italy.
2. 2001: it becomes the first French Specially Protected Area of Mediterranean Importance (SPAMI); it is also a founding member of MedPAN.

Three Natura 2000 sites lie at sea: the Rade d’Hyères, the Îles d’Hyères and the Corniche varoise; the Îles d’Hyères special protection area covers 47,905 ha, 94% of it marine.

Six thousand visitors a day on Porquerolles

The park puts its attendance at two million visitors a year, one of the highest among France’s eleven national parks, in a department, the Var, that ranks as the second tourist destination in France. About a dozen boat companies serve Porquerolles.

The park puts the island’s carrying-capacity threshold at about 6,000 visitors landed per day: beyond it, the share of dissatisfied visitors rises from 24% to 48%. To keep below it:

• The boat operators outside the public service contract have signed a charter committing them to keep the passengers they carry to Porquerolles to no more than 6,000 a day.
• The public service contract renewed in March 2021 regulates crossings during the summer periods concerned.
• The park developed alerts on Waze for heavy traffic on the presqu’île de Giens, and an app for boaters, Nav’Co.