Hidden France Map: 24 Maps of Silos, Ghost Ski Resorts and Witches

More than 375,000 maps on MapIndex lie in France, and a surprising number of them are inventories kept for decades by one person or one society. An astronomy society pins every sundial it has photographed. A collector counts dovecotes department by department and has passed 15,000. A Czech fortification fan walked the Maginot Line and wrote down which casemates are overgrown, which are locked and which are scrap. And a watchdog group measured the radiation on a uranium mine that a solar farm’s notices forget to mention.

1. Plateau d'Albion Map: France's Buried Nuclear Missile Field

   The silos of the Plateau d’Albion, drawn down to the blast door: each launch zone has its silo head (“24 x 4 m”), its 145-tonne door that opened pyrotechnically for launch, its electrified fence and an underground ground-wave antenna for the launch order at 9 to 20 kHz. Lines trace the Vestale microwave links between the mountain relay sites, and a third unit appears as “supposed” command post and launch zones. The best part is what each zone became: ZL 2.3 is now the Sault waste tip, ZL 1.8 a CEA seismic station, ZL 2.6 a GRAVES space-surveillance radar, and most of the rest solar farms.

   

   Objects

   14828 points, 53 lines, 67 areas

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

2. Speed Camera Vandalism Map: France's 2013 Revolt

   277 speed cameras that were painted, burned, axed or shot at during the 2013–2014 protests against the ecotax, each with a dated note. One in Lavau was painted white with black patches “like a cow hide”; one in Bordes had been damaged eight times before; three people were caught with an axe in Saint-Jean-sur-Vilaine. In Noyal the note adds that this camera model keeps a stock of spare armoured windows inside, so it would be repaired soon.

   

   Objects

   277276 points, 1 line

   Countries

   FranceBelgiumSwitzerland

   Made with

   Google My Maps

3. Breton Legends Map: 539 Ghosts, Saints and Hidden Treasures

   Brittany’s folklore, placed where the old collectors heard it. 144 revenants and haunted places, 93 miracles and holy sites, 40 sorcerers and curses, a dozen hidden treasures, each with the story quoted from Anatole Le Braz, Adolphe Orain and other 19th-century sources. A priest with his head in his hands walks the quarries of Saint-Méloir; a dead man who moved a boundary stone must carry it back; and a barrel of gold lies on a hill in Paramé, in a spot the sun reaches for one hour a year.

   

   Objects

   539534 points, 1 line, 4 areas

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

4. Abandoned Ski Resorts Map: 229 Ghost Stations in France

   Every one of these 229 ski areas has closed, and every pin links to its write-up on the blog Stations fantômes. They are not only in the Alps: the Vosges and Jura hold 45, more than any other range, and the Massif Central 27, next to 13 in the Pyrenees and small lifts that once ran in Chamonix itself.

   

   Objects

   229229 points

   Countries

   FranceSwitzerlandSpainand 1 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

5. Maginot Line Map: 821 Casemates and Their Condition Today

   A Czech visitor’s field log of the whole Maginot Line, from Flanders to Alsace, block by block. Each casemate gets a verdict in Czech: overgrown, accessible, walled up, “private land”, “good for photos”, “nothing to see”, or simply “šrot” (scrap). The artillery works add their armament, three 75 mm guns under concrete or a turret with twin 81 mm mortars, and links to the author’s site.

   

   Objects

   821820 points, 1 line

   Countries

   FranceGermanyBelgium

   Made with

   Google My Maps

6. Dovecote Map: 15,474 Pigeonniers Across France

   Michel Chanaud’s count of French dovecotes, at 15,474 in the September 2025 edition and sorted by department number. The names read like a field catalogue: cylindrical, hexagonal, porch dovecotes over a farm gate, “the big cylindrical dovecote of the château”, and a question mark where he is not yet sure.

   

   Objects

   15,47415,474 points

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

7. French Nuclear Weapons Map: From Uranium Mines to Mururoa

   The whole chain of France’s bomb on one map, in seven layers: research, uranium and plutonium, warhead parts, test sites, air bases, the submarine base and command. Notes count 181 explosions at Mururoa, 41 of them in the air, and four atmospheric tests at Reggane in the Algerian Sahara. The command posts include the Jupiter bunker under the Élysée and the antennas at Rosnay that send orders to the submarines; a 2024 note records the plan to make weapons tritium at the civilian Civaux plant.

   

   Objects

   3030 points

   Countries

   FranceAlgeriaFrench Polynesia

   Made with

   Google My Maps

8. Witchcraft Map of Normandy: 251 Sabbats and Spells

   Capitaine_Meow mapped Norman witchcraft town by town. On Mont Etenclin, sorcerers had to say “poule noire” three times to join the sabbat, and locals beat them on the way down. Pont-de-l’Arche had a beech hung with crucifixes and a pig locked in its prison for sorcery; a man in Alleaume was said to turn himself into a pig; the sorcerer Jean Caboche was flogged through the streets of Avranches.

   

   Objects

   251251 points

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

9. Aviation Lighthouse Map: France's Forgotten Air Beacons

   Before radio navigation, night pilots followed lighthouses on land. This catalogue of 137 aeronautical beacons from the 1920s on marks which still stand and which are gone, and it is still being researched: in July 2025 the Alzonne beacon was relocated from an old postcard. The Damazan beacon gave way to a retirement home, Castelnaudary’s sat on a farm roof, and the keeper at Lézignan-Corbières was a Citroën garage owner who loved aircraft.

   

   Objects

   137137 points

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   Google My Maps

10. French Signals Intelligence Map: DGSE Listening Stations

    France’s ears, as far as public sources reveal them: the DGSE radio centres at Domme, Alluets-le-Roi, Feucherolles and Saint-Laurent-de-la-Salanque, direction-finding stations from Ablis to Bonifacio, and the forward signals detachments from Djibouti to Abu Dhabi and New Caledonia. Notes check satellite photos for dismantled antennas (“Arles station apparently abandoned”) and mark the landing points of undersea cables at Dieppe and Saint-Valery.

    

    Objects

    6457 points, 7 lines

    Countries

    FranceSenegalMayotteand 14 more

    Made with

    Google My Maps

    Versions

    1 other version

11. Lost Railways Map: France's Closed Stations by Company

    The French network as the old railway companies built it, PLM, Est, PO, Midi and the rest, with every station marked open or closed and a layer for the stations opened since. The metre-gauge lines carry their closing years, from Trévoux to Saint-Trivier (1934–36) to Gex–Ferney-Voltaire (1932), and Paris’s Petite Ceinture appears as closed in 1934.

    

    Objects

    4,7584,144 points, 537 lines, 77 areas

    Countries

    FranceSwitzerlandMonacoand 3 more

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

12. Treasure Legends Map: 641 Lost Hoards of France

    Olivier Pinon’s register of French treasure, legend and fact side by side. Templar commanderies said to hide a golden calf or a silver bell; a farm near the village whose priest grew mysteriously rich; the diamonds of Joachim Murat, who raised a small army in Corsica in 1815; and real finds, such as 200 silver coins of Honorius, cited from the regional archaeology journal.

    

    Objects

    641621 points, 9 lines, 11 areas

    Countries

    FrancePolandGermanyand 7 more

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

13. Speed Camera Map: France's 100 Busiest Cameras

    The hundred fixed cameras that flashed most in 2014, ranked, with road, direction and type. Number one, on the RN10 at Maine-de-Boixe towards Poitiers, flashed 169,895 times that year, 465 a day; the A7 at Bédarrides and the A8 above the Esterel follow, and two of the top 20 stand on the Paris ring road.

    

    Objects

    100100 points

    Countries

    France

    Made with

    Google My Maps

14. Atlantic Wall Bunker Map: What France Did With Them

    108 coastal bunkers sorted by their second life: museums, nature reserves, artworks and homes. At Gatteville at least two became houses, at Ver-sur-Mer a converted bunker went on sale in 2016, one became a sheepfold with a mural called “La Belle Endormie”, and a commune turned another into a picnic table named “La Tour Penchée”. On Cézembre the marked path skirts ground still not cleared of mines.

    

    Objects

    108108 points

    Countries

    FranceBelgium

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

15. Uranium Mine Map: A Watchdog's Radiation Survey

    CRIIRAD, the independent radiation laboratory, maps France’s former uranium mines with its own readings on top: radon flux zones around the Écarpière mine, water and sediment samples downstream, and radiometric points at a mine “accessible to the public, no signs, no fence”. One pin marks the notices for a planned solar farm on the old site, which, the note says, do not mention the uranium mine.

    

    Objects

    2,921116 points, 58 lines, 2,747 areas

    Countries

    FranceSwitzerlandItalyand 2 more

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

16. Werewolf Map of France: Dogman Encounters Since the 1830s

    41 encounters with werewolves and “dogmen”, each with a date and the witness’s account: a great-grandparent’s story from the 1830s in Burgundy, two teenagers in a village between Poitiers and Angoulême in 1991, a driver in the Seillon forest in 1986, someone leaving an Avignon nightclub at three in the morning in 2011.

    

    Objects

    4141 points

    Countries

    France

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

17. Gaulish Place Names Map: 1,522 Villages Named for Celts

    1,522 villages read as the estates of Gaulish landowners, each with its INSEE code, the reconstructed Gaulish form and its meaning: Ablis from aballiocon, “the estate of Aballiocos”; Agonac from aconacon; Albi from albia. Looking up your own village is hard to resist.

    

    Objects

    1,5221,522 points

    Countries

    France

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

18. Vosges Cableways Map: Dead Ski Lifts and War Ropeways

    265 vanished cableways in the Vosges, in three kinds: 173 ski lifts, 39 industrial lines and 53 military ones. The German army’s Ilienkopf ropeways supplied the front from 1915; quarry and mine cables carried stone to Gérardmer and spoil to the potash tips; a cable hauled materials up for the Grand Ballon radio tower; and a 1958 cable brought the milk down from the Schallern farm.

    

    Objects

    26589 points, 176 lines

    Countries

    France

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

19. Internment Camp Map: France's Camps 1938 to 1948

    482 camps over ten years, sorted by who ran them: assembly centres for foreigners of 1939–40, Vichy’s foreign-worker groups and “supervised residence” centres, Organization Todt camps on the coast, Wehrmacht Frontstalags and the camps for Roma such as Montreuil-Bellay. Notes give numbers and sources, such as 3,000 “Red Spaniards” in Bordeaux’s Niel barracks and the mix of Germans, Russians and other foreigners in each Todt camp of the Cotentin.

    

    Objects

    482482 points

    Countries

    FranceAlgeriaMoroccoand 4 more

    Made with

    Google My Maps

20. Lost Urbex Sites Map: Where the Ruins Went

    An explorer’s database of 5,157 abandoned places, with a layer for the ones that are gone and what replaced them. The Aquarius nightclub became an Aldi, another club a McDonald’s, the Liancourt prison was “demolished after a fire”, the Toul-Rosières air base turned into a solar farm. The other layers sort the places still to visit, by castles, schools, churches, railways and nightclubs.

    

    Objects

    5,1575,157 points

    Countries

    FranceBelgiumItalyand 61 more

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

21. UFO Map of France: 257 Official GEIPAN Cases

    Decades of UFO reports, each linked to its file at GEIPAN, the space agency’s office for unidentified phenomena. Trans-en-Provence on 8 January 1981: an object lands and leaves traces on the ground. Cuxac-Cabardès that same month: a cigar-shaped object with traces on the ground and on a car. Nice in December 1981: 80 to 100 luminous objects and many witnesses.

    

    Objects

    257245 points, 12 lines

    Countries

    FranceRéunionNew Caledoniaand 7 more

    Made with

    Google My Maps

22. Cave Chapel Map: Rock-Cut Refuges of Provence

    91 places in Provence and the southeast where people carved into rock or walled up a cave: a castle cut into a rock tooth above Aurons, a fortified cave in the cliffs over Salon, a two-storey grotto near the Verdon gorges, hermitage chapels under the cliffs of Digne and Valbelle. Near Ceyreste a 20-metre shaft has monumental stairs “whose purpose remains unexplained”.

    

    Objects

    9191 points

    Countries

    France

    Made with

    Google My Maps

23. Sundial Map: Every Sundial Photographed in France

    The inventory of the Société Astronomique de France’s sundial commission, so dense that it opens as clusters of thousands: almost 75,000 pins from Brittany to Corsica and the overseas departments, filed by department number.

    

    Objects

    74,93474,934 points

    Countries

    FranceRéunionGuadeloupeand 8 more

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

    Versions

    3 other versions

24. Alchemy Map of France: Esoteric Churches and Mansions

    Gwilhermig’s map of alchemical France: churches, castles, mansions and fountains read for hermetic symbols, with sources from Mystères alchimiques de Bourgogne. Saint-Gervais in Paris has “alchemical sculptures under the benches”, and lines drawn across the country turn Chambord, Chartres and Troyes into the corners of squares and a 5-12-13 triangle.

    

    Objects

    10696 points, 10 lines

    Countries

    FranceBelgiumCzechia

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap