The View from the Rond du Roi

The Rond du Roi (Kiing's Circle) Panorama, where you can enjoy a wide view of the town, is a small piece of Famenne soil that constitutes an exceptionally pure example of our typical rural countryside. The Lesse and Lhomme Natural Park offers vegetal life an extraordinary variety of milieus, owing to the soil’s many contrasts and nuances and the fact that it benefits from a sunnier and warmer climate than the Condroz and the Ardennes (the annual rainfall is far less abundant here: a mere 850mm compared to 1.000 to 1.100 mm in the Ardennes). In this protected area, the vegetal species are remarkable, and the most widespread species is the Downy oak, which you can constantly admire, perched on the upper parts of the warmer and sunnier hillsides. The soil is rather rocky; the top layer is cracked limestone. The soil is extremely permeable, and hardly retains any water at all; the other plants have to adapt to the drought. Unlike the Ardennes forest, the Famenne forest is essentially composed of deciduous trees (beech, hornbeam, oak and maple trees). Man planted Norway Pine and Austrian Pine (also known as European Black Pine because of the colour of its trunk). When planted in a cluster, the pines are rather bare and very tall, like around the Rond du Roi, but when planted in isolated clumps (the Han Belvédère), the trees are smaller and denser. The pine needles that grow in pairs are very different from those of the spruce trees that tend to grow in the Ardennes.

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