Hidden France Map: 24 Maps of Silos, Ghost Ski Resorts and Witches
Albion's nuclear silos, painted speed cameras, ghost ski resorts, Breton revenants, 15,000 dovecotes, DGSE listening posts and the bunkers people now live in.
Updated
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
France
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Monaco
Poland
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New Caledonia
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Czechia