The France map is one page: every free French stopover on this site, clustered, on one map. Start there.
The rest of this page is how to use it without driving somewhere for nothing.
What an aire is, in one paragraph
An aire is a stopover a French commune has set aside for motorhomes. The full name, aire de services pour camping-cars, tells you what it is for: services, and a night’s parking. There is usually no reception, no barrier and nobody to ask. The mairie sets the hours and the stay limit and posts them on a sign at the entrance. Full version: what is an aire.
An aire is not a campsite, and the difference matters legally as well as practically. See wild camping vs free camping vs aires.
What is on our France map
The current French layer holds:
- 2,066 free places
- 2,018 of them with a name
- 566 carrying a name plus two or more recorded amenities
Every pin carries its source, a link back to it, and the date a person last confirmed it. Look at that date before anything else. A record checked last month and a record checked three years ago are not the same information, and only one of them is worth a detour.
What the map will not show you
The French pins come from OpenStreetMap alone, filtered to fee=no.
Two consequences you should factor into any plan:
It is a floor, not a total. Only a small share of camp and caravan records in OpenStreetMap carry a fee tag at all. A commune’s free aire that nobody has tagged with a price is not in the filter, so it does not appear. There are certainly more free aires in France than 2,066, which means an empty stretch of map is not an empty stretch of road. Ask at the mairie or the tourist office in a town that shows nothing.
fee=no is a contributor’s claim, not a municipal one, and it can be years
old. Where a place page links to a commune or tourist office listing, trust the
listing. Where it does not, arrive with coins and expect to pay for water, since
free parking and a free borne are two different things.
DATAtourisme, the French open data platform where a lot of tourism authorities publish their aire listings, is not behind these pins. Departmental and regional tourist office sites carry aires this map does not, so they are worth a search when you are fixing a route.
Start at the region, not the country
The country map is the right surface for “what does France look like.” It is the wrong surface for planning a week, because 2,066 pins spread over a country tells you very little about where you can string nights together.
The region pages do that job. Each one has its own map plus written notes on where the free stopovers actually cluster, what the driving is like, and what the season does to them.
| Region | Free places in our layer |
|---|---|
| Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes | 364 |
| Nouvelle-Aquitaine | 336 |
| Occitania | 221 |
| Bourgogne-Franche-Comté | 179 |
| Brittany | 117 |
| Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur | 99 |
The counts are not the interesting part. The distribution inside each region is. Nouvelle-Aquitaine has the second largest count in France and almost none of it is on the Atlantic beach strip. Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur is one of the most visited regions in the country and its free places sit inland and in the mountains rather than on the Riviera. A region page says that in the first paragraph, and a pin count never will.
Reading a free pin properly
Four checks, in order.
1. Free refers to the parking. The two halves of an aire are priced separately. Free parking with a metered borne is the standard French shape: a couple of euros to empty, a couple more for a timed run of drinking water, a few for a few hours of electricity. Some communes charge nothing for either. Assume metered until the page says otherwise.
2. A blank amenity is a question, not a no. Where a page shows a facility as not listed, nobody wrote it down either way. Plan as though it is not there, and be pleased if it is.
3. The stay limit is local. There is no national French figure. Communes commonly post 24, 48 or 72 hours. The legal backstop, Article R417-12 of the Code de la route, is set out on our France country page, along with why it is an outer bound on parking rather than permission to overstay a posted limit.
4. The sign wins. Over the map, over the app, over this page. A mayor can change what an aire allows by arrêté, and can do it without telling anyone who is not standing at the entrance reading the sign.
Before you go
Bring a way to buy a jeton, the token some bornes run on, which is sold at the mairie, the tourist office, a bar-tabac or a supermarket rather than at the aire. Turn up on a Sunday afternoon and there may be nobody to sell you one.
Plan the service stop separately from the overnight stop, because plenty of free stopovers are free precisely because there is nothing on them to pay for.
And if you are building a route around all this, we have written one that is designed not to need reservations: when to book nothing. The general European picture is in free camping in Europe, and the cost and logistics side in motorhome travel in Europe.
This is not a wild camping map
Every pin is somewhere a commune, a municipality or an agency set aside for the purpose. For anything outside one of those, particularly the difference between bivouac and camping sauvage and the national park rules that govern it, read France: bivouac, camping and the national park rules before you park.