The Kraffts' vision might have died with them had it not captivated Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the former President of France. After leaving national office, Giscard d'Estaing served as President of the Regional Council of Auvergne, and he threw his political weight behind the project. His involvement guaranteed both funding and controversy. Environmentalists objected to building in the heart of the Chaine des Puys. Fiscal critics pointed to overestimated visitor projections -- by 2004, the park was running a deficit of 1.707 million euros. The political dimension made every setback a headline. Yet Giscard d'Estaing pressed forward, arguing that the site's former use as a military installation with hydrocarbon deposits meant the project was rehabilitating damaged land rather than despoiling pristine wilderness.

Austrian architect Hans Hollein, winner of architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, designed Vulcania as an experience that begins the moment visitors start walking downhill. A ramp descends toward a cone-shaped structure clad in dark volcanic stone, its interior lined with gleaming gold metal -- a metaphorical volcano you enter rather than observe from a distance. The decision to sink three-quarters of the building underground was both aesthetic and practical, minimizing the visual footprint on the volcanic landscape while creating an immersive sense of descent. Inside, IMAX theaters, research facilities, conference rooms, and greenhouses highlighting volcanic soil's fertility fill the subterranean space. A restaurant offers panoramic views of the surrounding natural park, a reminder that the real volcanoes are just outside.

Vulcania walks an unusual line between education and entertainment. Its centerpiece 4-D film, "The Awakening of the Auvergne Giants," imagines the dormant volcanoes around the park stirring to life. In 2008, the park introduced the VolcanBul, a GPS-guided electric vehicle that takes visitors on tours of the volcanic landscape surrounding the complex -- a deliberate strategy to encourage full-day visits rather than the half-day pattern typical of museum-style attractions. The park sits in the commune of Saint-Ours-les-Roches, roughly 15 kilometers northwest of Clermont-Ferrand, embedded in a landscape where the science on display is also the geology underfoot. The Chaine des Puys contains roughly 80 volcanic domes, cinder cones, and lava flows, the youngest of which erupted only about 6,700 years ago.

The name Vulcania reaches back through centuries of mythology. Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and the forge, appears in Virgil's Aeneid as a smithy beneath the earth. Jules Verne placed Captain Nemo's secret base in a volcanic lair. The park trades on this deep association between volcanoes and hidden power, but its real subject is the Auvergne itself -- a region shaped entirely by volcanism. The fertile soils, the mineral springs, the distinctive landscape of rounded domes and steep-sided cones all trace back to eruptions that occurred within geological memory. Vulcania exists to make that connection vivid, translating the abstract timescale of geology into something a visitor can feel in a darkened theater or see from a GPS-guided cart rolling through terrain that was, not so very long ago, on fire.