Geographic lesson

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Hello everyone, 

You might not know it but France is divided in 18 regions and 101 deparments and they are not all in metropolitan France. 

We have indeed other places all over the world, where the French government has an impact. Here are the main french territories overseas:

  • La Réunion
  • Martinique
  • Guadeloupe
  • Mayotte
  • Guyane
  • Polynésie Française
  • ...
If you want a full list here is a link to a page indicating you the name of the other French territories: 

What is a region?

In France a region has a main city called: cehf-lieu de région, meaning: chief town of the region and they are subdivided within departments. The goal of a region is mainly to handle the schools, public transports, infrastructure, universities... however they can't create laws for instance. 

There are 13 region in metropolitan France and 5 in overseas territories.

In 2016 the government decided to change the number of region of France from 27 to 18, they also changed their names.

Here is the list of the region in France:

What is a department?

A department is a subdivision of a region. It creates and organises departmental public services: school transport, PMI, social welfare services, RSA, departmental roads... They also have capitals that are called: Préfecture. You can find the departments map just above. Each of these departments have a number that you can find on license plates for instance:

Here is a link with the list of all the department and their prefecture: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Departments_of_France#Current_departments

A little bit of information about where I come from:

I come from a region called Auvergne Rhône Alpes, who used to be called Auvergne and who now merged with the region Rhône Alpes. But more specifically my department is the Puy-de-Dôme and from it's prefecture: Clermont-Ferrand.

To be quite honest, it's not the most active region or department in the country. However, there are a few things to see, to do or to eat :).

For the landscape we have: la chaîne des puys => the puys chain. To be more explicit it's several volcanos following each other, a bit like in a chain, but do not worry they all are asleep. The main volcanos will be: Le Puy de Dôme (biggest one, that gave it's name to the department), Le Puy de la Vache, Puy de Pariou et Puy de Sancy. 

On the picture below you can see la chaîne des puys, the big one on the left is le Puy de Dôme.


We also have many cities and villages that can be really beautiful and interesting to visit. 

For the food we have a lot of cheese:
  • Saint-Nectaire
  • Cantal
  • Bleu d'Auvergne
And dishes like: 
  • Aligot
  • Truffade
  • Potée
  • Tripoux
  • ...
If you ever are interesting in knowing more about the deparments you can always let me know through the comment. This was a brief introduction to the place where I spent most of life. It might not be as sunny or as big as the South of France or Paris, but it's a really nice place to live. And especially if you like cheese and dishes associated to the cheese or if you like to hike.
As you can guess there are a lot of hikes that you can do in the region due to the landscape and the volcanos. Furthermore, since the volcanos are asleep you can go hike in their cratere and trust me it's pretty cool.

Thank you for reading :)

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