Both a science park and an amusement park, Vulcania has a dual mission: to promote the dissemination of knowledge about the Earth sciences and to create economic dynamism in the Auvergne region.
These missions are based on Vulcania’s own skills, but also on networking with the scientific, educational and economic worlds. The content of the messages delivered to the public is systematically validated by an independent International Scientific Council. This work, developed since the opening of Vulcania in 2002, has made Vulcania a scientific reference and a tool with quantified economic benefits for Auvergne.
Visits, school workshops and scientific activities are supervised by scientific mediators, specialised in Earth Sciences. Many of these mediators are graduates of the volcanology courses given by the Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, further proof of Vulcania’s legitimacy within the volcanoes of Auvergne
From scientific to educational: activities designed for everyone
True to its educational mission, the Vulcania science park accompanies the youngest visitors in their discovery of volcanoes and the forces of nature, an integral part of the school curriculum. The richness of the scenography and the experiments around the volcanoes are indeed adapted to interdisciplinary approaches such as History, Geography, Environmental Education, Physical Sciences, Architecture, Plastic Arts… Thus, close links have been established with the educational world. An authentic and exceptional scenography thanks to the Krafft collections.
Maurice and Katia KRAFFT, legendary figures in French volcanology, travelled the world for twenty-five years to study the fires of the Earth. The Vulcania visitors have the chance to see and hear volcanic testimonies from a real-life “volcano” experience, and to reproduce them in our scientific park. The rumblings of the Crater, for example, are a creation based on sounds recorded on Italian, Icelandic and Indonesian volcanoes.
As an amusement park focused on observation and experiments, Vulcania fully contributes, in line with its educational ambition, to the understanding of the sometimes violent natural phenomena that govern our planet.
