For families who want their French holiday to come with a proper sense of adventure, the Pyrenees delivers in spectacular fashion. This is mountain France at its most dramatic and most accessible — a landscape of soaring peaks, turquoise glacial lakes, rushing rivers and deep gorges that gives children a genuine sense of the wild without requiring any real mountaineering ability. White-water rafting, via ferrata, mountain biking and horse trekking are all easily arranged, and in summer the cable cars and chairlifts that serve the ski resorts in winter open up high-altitude walking at any fitness level. The medieval pilgrimage town of Conques, the bastide villages of the Aveyron and the caves of the Ariège add a rich cultural layer for parents, while the simple pleasure of swimming in a cold mountain river on a hot afternoon needs no cultural context whatsoever. Farm accommodation here tends to be genuinely rural — expect local cheese, home-grown vegetables and a real feeling of having escaped — and the region sits close to both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, making combination holidays very easy to plan.