This chain of volcanoes including numerous cinder cones, lava domes and maars is far from the edge of any tectonic plate.

In pre-Christian Europe, Puy de Dôme was an assembly place for spiritual ceremonies.

[7] In 1648, Florin Périer, at the urging of Blaise Pascal, supported Evangelista Torricelli's theory that barometric observations were caused by the weight of air by measuring the height of a column of mercury at three elevations on Puy de Dôme.

The northern one, "Le sentier des chèvres" ("The Goat Trail"), runs past the Nid de la Poule (Hen's Nest} crater.

A road exists along the railway but it is closed to general traffic, except for the military, service vehicles or emergencies.

At the top of the mountain, restaurants and shops are available as well as a visitor centre giving information on the history and geology of the area.

In respect of its key role in the development of volcanology as a geoscience discipline, the Puy-de-Dôme and Petite-Puy-de-Dôme volcanoes were included by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) in its assemblage of 100 "geological heritage sites" around the world in a listing published in October 2022.