FreeCampMaps FreeCampMaps
DE
Motorhomes and cars parked in a gravel stopover below jagged mountains
Country · France 2.965 on the map 11 regions

Free camping and aires in France

An aire is a stopover a French commune has set aside for motorhomes, and France has more of them than anywhere else in Europe. Many are free to park on. The mairie sets the hours and the stay limit, and the sign at the entrance is the one that counts.

Open the France map Every place in France ↓

01 · Map

Free stopovers in France

Open any pin for its fee, its services and the date it was last checked. For wild camping, read the rules below rather than the map. Where this comes from

Open the full map

1.463 Entsorgungsstationen in Frankreich

Die Zahlen hinter der Karte

MapLibre GL · OpenFreeMap · loads on scroll

02 · Recently checked

Stopovers checked most recently

See them all
A broad braided river valley seen through spruce, with snow on the peaks beyondAireGebühr nicht angegeben

Aire de services et de stationnement

Grand Est · N 48.75°

  • TrinkwasserTrinkwasser: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • ToilettenToiletten: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • DuschenDuschen: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • StromStrom: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • EntsorgungsstationEntsorgungsstation: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf

Checked Aug 27

A broad braided river valley seen through spruce, with snow on the peaks beyondAireKostenlos

AIRE DE SERVICE DU CAYLAR

Occitania · N 43.86°

  • TrinkwasserTrinkwasser: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • ToilettenToiletten: Bestätigt
  • DuschenDuschen: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • StromStrom: Bestätigt
  • EntsorgungsstationEntsorgungsstation: Bestätigt

Checked Aug 25

A white motorhome on a grass pitch among treesAireGebühr nicht angegeben

Aire d'accueil de Biochon

Pays de la Loire · N 47.13°

  • TrinkwasserTrinkwasser: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • ToilettenToiletten: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • DuschenDuschen: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • StromStrom: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • EntsorgungsstationEntsorgungsstation: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf

Checked Aug 25

Motorhomes parked on a headland above a wild grey beachAireKostenpflichtig

Aire d'Accueil des Pinettes

Pays de la Loire · N 47.14°

  • TrinkwasserTrinkwasser: Bestätigt
  • ToilettenToiletten: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • DuschenDuschen: Nicht bestätigt, verlass dich nicht darauf
  • StromStrom: Bestätigt
  • EntsorgungsstationEntsorgungsstation: Bestätigt

Checked Aug 25

Most recently checked first, so the ones at the top are the least likely to have changed since.

03 · Regions · 11

By region

Nach Département · 60

Aires nach Département

04 · Every place

All 2.965 places in France

See them on the map

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 147 places

Bourgogne-Franche-Comté 327 places

Brittany 33 places

1 more on the map here without a written page. See them on the map

Centre-Val de Loire 272 places

Grand Est 460 places

Hauts-de-France 28 places

Normandy 291 places

Nouvelle-Aquitaine 550 places

Occitania 426 places

Pays de la Loire 411 places

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur 20 places

05 · How it works here

Free camping in France, explained

An aire is a stopover a French commune has set aside for motorhomes. Most are a levelled bit of ground with marked bays, a drinking water tap and a drain for emptying tanks. Some have nothing but the ground. What they almost never have is a reception, a barrier or anyone to talk to, and that is the point: you arrive, you park, you leave.

They exist because communes worked out that a passing motorhome spends money in the bakery and the bar even if it pays nothing to sleep. An aire is tourist infrastructure, not a campsite, and the rules follow from that. Stays are short. Awnings, chairs and washing lines are generally not welcome, because that is camping, and camping happens at campsites.

Aires are common enough in rural France that in much of the country you can plan a day’s driving around finding one. France has around 34,000 communes and no official national register of aires, so plan around the ones you can see on a map or on a commune’s own site rather than around a national total. Any precise national figure you are quoted comes from an aggregator, not an authority.

Aire de services and aire de stationnement

These are two different things that often share a car park, and confusing them is the most common way an English-speaking traveller ends up with full tanks and nowhere to sleep.

An aire de services is the machinery. A borne is the service pillar: drinking water, usually a drain for grey water, and a point for emptying the cassette or the black tank. Some bornes add a 230V socket. You pull alongside, do the job, and move off. A service point is not a parking space and is not somewhere to spend the night, and on a busy aire in August somebody will be waiting behind you.

An aire de stationnement is the parking. Marked bays, sometimes on tarmac, sometimes on gravel or grass, where you are permitted to stay overnight.

Many communal aires are both, which is why the distinction gets lost. But a motorway aire may have a borne and no right to sleep on it. A village car park signed for motorhomes may have bays and no water within a kilometer. Plan the service stop separately from the overnight stop and you will not be caught out.

What free actually means here

Free on a French aire usually means free to park. It does not reliably mean free to fill up.

The typical arrangement is an open car park with no charge for the night and a borne that wants money: a jeton, a token you buy from the mairie, the tourist office or a village shop, or increasingly a coin or card slot. Bénéjacq in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques publishes the ordinary version of this on its own commune site: water and electricity on jetons, bought at the mairie or in the shops on Place de la Fontaine (verified 2026-07-20).

The practical consequence is about opening hours, not money. A jeton costs very little. A mairie in a small commune may be open three mornings a week, and it will certainly be shut on Sunday, when a lot of people arrive. If your water plan depends on a token, buy the token before you need the water.

Some communes go the other way and give everything away. Aube in the Orne runs around 20 free places with no mention of tokens at all (verified 2026-07-20). Both patterns are normal. Neither is predictable from the map.

How long you can stay

There is no national time limit on an aire. The commune sets it and posts it.

24, 48 and 72 hours are the numbers you will see, and 48 is the most common. Bénéjacq posts 48 hours. That is a local decision, repeated independently by thousands of communes until it looks like a rule, and it is not one. The sign at this particular entrance is the only figure that binds you, so read it when you pull in and work to that.

What French law does say sits further out. Article R417-12 of the Code de la route makes parking abusif once a vehicle stays continuously at the same point on a public road or its dependencies for more than seven days, or for a shorter period where that period has been fixed by arrêté of the authority holding police powers. Abusive parking is a second-class fine, and the vehicle can be immobilized and impounded (Légifrance, verified 2026-07-20). Two things follow. Seven days is an outer bound on parking anywhere on the public road, not a permission to overstay a two-night sign. And the phrase “fixed by arrêté” is the whole story of French motorhome rules in five words: the local order wins.

The mairie sets the rules, and the arrêté municipal is the instrument

If you remember one structural fact about France, make it this one. The rules that govern where you sleep are made at commune level by the maire, and the instrument is the arrêté municipal, a municipal order.

Article R111-34 of the Code de l’urbanisme is the clearest statement of the mechanism. Camping outside developed sites can be banned in defined zones by the local urban plan, and the maire can also ban it by arrêté where the practice would harm public health, safety or public order, natural or urban landscapes, protected views, natural habitats, or farming and forestry. The same article adds the part travelers should care about most: those bans are only enforceable if they have been made public by posting at the mairie and by signs at the usual access points to the zone (Légifrance, verified 2026-07-20).

Read that last clause again. French law itself makes the sign the operative document. A ban that has not been posted and signed is not enforceable against you, and a ban that has been is. That is not a disclaimer we are adding at the bottom of the page. It is how the rule is built.

Camping and parking are not the same thing

Note also what French law is not doing here. R111-34 governs camping. R417-12 governs parking. A motorhome parked in marked bays with nothing deployed is parking; the same vehicle with the awning out, chairs on the grass and the step down starts to look like camping, and the two are not judged the same way. The central government’s own consumer-facing guidance on this family of vehicles covers caravans and mobil-homes in private gardens and does not address roadside motorhome parking at all (service-public.gouv.fr, verified 2026-07-20), which is a fair signal of how local the question is.

In practice: park in the marked bays, keep everything inside the van, and the question does not come up.

Seasons

August is the crunch. French domestic holidays concentrate hard in August, and coastal aires in Brittany, the Vendée, Charente-Maritime, Languedoc and the Var are the first to fill. In season a number of coastal and resort communes restrict motorhome parking, price it, or close aires to overnight use, and they enforce it hardest when they are busiest. Restrictions like that are set commune by commune, so check the commune’s own site before you commit to a coast in August, and have a second aire inland in mind for the nights you arrive late.

Winter is the opposite problem and it is better documented. Inland and upland aires shut the water off so the pipes do not freeze, and some close the site entirely. The bays can stay open with a dead borne, which is the trap. Aube in the Orne publishes its own dates: open all year, water distribution closed from December 1 to March 1 (verified 2026-07-20). Every commune sets its own window and can change it without notice, so fill the tank while you know the tap works.

June and September are the easy months in most of the country. The aires are running, the water is on, and you are not queueing for a bay.

If you are in a tent

Then aires are not for you, and the word you need is bivouac. France treats bivouac and camping as different activities with different rules, and the distinction is strict enough to be worth reading before you go: bivouac means one night, minimal kit, up at dusk and gone at dawn, and the official definition excludes anything motorized. Start with the French bivouac rules.

Before you rely on any of this

The posted sign at the entrance and the commune’s current guidance beat this website, always. Aires close for works, for a village fête, for a market day, or for the winter, and rarely with notice. If the aire is barriered or the sign contradicts what you read here, the sign is right.

New to the word itself? Start with what an aire actually is. To see how France compares with the countries either side of it, read free camping in Europe.

Where the numbers here come from: 1,890 French aires, each with a page here, 1,866 of them from DATAtourisme under the Licence Ouverte and 24 from OpenStreetMap. The map shows those and nothing else, so every pin on it has a page behind it. A further 2,041 designated places are logged and not yet written up, which is why a blank stretch of map means unwritten rather than empty. What the data covers, and what it does not

06 · The legal position

What the law in France allows

What the law allows in France, in plain English, with the official source on the card beside this. Whatever it says, the sign where you park is the rule that counts.

Read the full rules

Le bivouac, Portail des parcs nationaux de France

France distinguishes bivouac from camping sauvage, and the distinction decides what is legal. The national parks portal defines bivouac as taking place over a single night in a basic setup, and says camping sauvage is strictly prohibited in park cores. Bivouac is a walker's permission: several parks explicitly exclude camping-cars, vans and roof tents. Each park sets its own hours and conditions, so there is no single national window. Two parks ban bivouac in their cores completely: Port-Cros and Porquerolles, and the Calanques.

  • Parc amazonien de Guyane: ask the park before you plan a night in the core. Access and activities there need the director's authorization on a form, and the park's regulation page states no bivouac rule either way.
  • Parc national de la Guadeloupe: plan a dusk to dawn bivouac and confirm the hours with the park rather than working to a clock. The park's own page confirms that camping is not permitted in the core and that bivouac is allowed only more than one hour's walk from a core boundary or a road access, and it states no start and end time. The dusk to dawn pattern is the national parks portal's description.
  • Parc national de La Reunion: pitch before sunset and take the tent or hammock down in the morning, which is what the park's own page requires. That is the sun, not a clock, and it is a different shape of rule from the mainland parks' fixed hours. The national parks portal describes a sunset to 08:00 window, but the park's own page gives no 08:00 and no one night limit, so work to the light and be packed up early.
  • Parc national du Mercantour: check the park's own site for the outcome of its public consultation on reforming the bivouac regulation before you go. The conditions described here come from the park's own FAQ, and a reform would move them.
  • Adhesion areas, meaning the zones around each park core rather than the core itself: check the commune, not the park. Park bivouac regulations bite in the core. Outside it you are back under the general camping rules and whatever the commune has posted at the mairie and at the access points.
  • Fines: read the posted notice or ask the park for the figure that applies where you are. They vary by park and by offense, so a number from one park tells you nothing about the next.

Open the source Checked Jul 20

07 · Frequently asked

Coming to France.

Are French aires really free?

Many are free to park on and charge for services through a token or card machine, typically water and electricity. Others are free outright, including the water. A smaller number charge for the night. Free parking with a paid borne is the arrangement you will meet most often, so carry small coins even on the nights that cost nothing, and buy a jeton at the mairie while it is open.

How long can I stay on an aire?

Whatever the sign says. There is no national limit. Communes commonly post 24, 48 or 72 hours, and 48 is the figure you will meet most often, but that is a local convention rather than a law, so read the sign on arrival and set your alarm by it rather than by 48. Separately, Article R417-12 of the Code de la route makes parking abusive once a vehicle sits continuously in one spot on a public road for over seven days, or for less where the authority holding police powers has fixed a shorter period by arrêté. That is an outer bound on parking, not permission to stay six nights on an aire that posts two.

What is the difference between an aire de services and an aire de stationnement?

An aire de services is the machinery: a borne for drinking water, a drain for grey water, and a point for emptying the chemical toilet. An aire de stationnement is the parking, meaning marked bays you can sleep in. Plenty of aires are both. Plenty are only one. A motorway service area may have a borne and no right to sleep, and a village car park may have bays and no water at all. Do not assume the overnight stop is a service stop.

What is a jeton and where do I get one?

A jeton is a token that runs the borne. You buy them from the mairie, the tourist office, or a shop in the village, which means the machine is effectively closed when those are closed. Bénéjacq in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques is a plain example: its own commune page says the water and electricity run on jetons bought at the mairie or in the shops on Place de la Fontaine. Carry small coins as well, because a lot of bornes take those instead, and do not plan a Sunday arrival around a token you have not bought.

Will there be water in winter?

Often not, and the bays can stay open with a dead tap. Communes shut the borne off over winter so the pipework does not freeze. Aube in the Orne publishes exactly that on its own site: the aire is open all year, the water distribution point is closed from December 1 to March 1. Dates vary by commune and altitude, and nobody is obliged to tell us when they change.

Can I use an aire if I am in a tent?

No. Aires are motorhome infrastructure, and a tent on an aire is camping, which is what campsites are for. If you are on foot the word you need is bivouac, and French rules treat bivouac and camping as different activities with different limits. Read the bivouac rules before you rely on either.

What will I find on the France map?

The aires French mappers have recorded, which runs dense in some departments and thin in others. Where it is thin, ask at the mairie or the office de tourisme, which is where a commune documents its own aire if it documents it anywhere. There is no official national register of aires, so use the map to shape the route and the commune to confirm the night.