The Vallée des Merveilles collection looks to the ancient history of a landscape that is very much part of our present: the Côte d’Azur and the Alpes-Maritimes, our cycling playground. Long before there were roads to ride, there were paths to follow: the climbs and valleys we ride today have been travelled by people for hundreds of thousands of years, leaving traces that reach far beyond the modern Riviera.

Here, the archaeological record reveals an extraordinary continuity of human habitation. At the Grotte du Vallonnet, near Menton, there is evidence of human occupation around a million years ago – long before homo sapiens existed! And at Terra Amata, only a few hundred metres from our store in Nice, there are remains of communities living on the beach at least 200,000 years ago, when the Mediterranean was twenty-six metres higher than it is today.

Further east, the Grotte de Grimaldi preserves evidence of Cro-Magnon occupation, including burials and objects left behind around 25,000 years ago. The famous "skeleton of Menton" – the first full prehistoric skeleton ever found – of a woman from that period is among the remains discovered in these caves, connecting the modern coast to a much deeper human past.

From this perspective, the people who made the engravings in what we know today as the Vallée des Merveilles, beginning around 5,000 years ago, are incredibly modern. From the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, thousands of figures and symbols were carved into the glacially polished rock. Weapons, animals, human forms and abstract signs transformed the mountain itself into a vast record of ancient life.

The collection takes inspiration from these ancient marks, but also from the landscape that connects them all. Rock, cave, strata and shelter become a visual language for a place shaped by people, climate and time. The same mountains we ride through today have been a place that people have left their mark for more than a million years.

See more of the collection here.