The (; "Dog's Head") is a 550 m (1,804 ft) high rock promontory near the village of La Turbie in the department of France. It overlooks the

Principality of Monaco Monaco, officially the Principality of Monaco, is a sovereign city-state and microstate on the French Riviera a few kilometres west of the Italian region of Liguria, in Western Europe, on the Mediterranean Sea. It is a semi-enclave borde ...

, and is the highest point on the road. The American diplomat Samuel S. Cox, in his 1870 travel book ''Search for Winter Sunbeams in the Riviera, Corsica, Algiers and Spain'' wrote that the more resembled a tortoise than a dog's head, and believed that , or rather , was a corruption of ("Field Head"), as it was where

Caesar Gaius Julius Caesar (12 or 13 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC) was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war. He ...

stationed his troops after the conquest of

Gaul Gaul () was a region of Western Europe first clearly described by the Roman people, Romans, encompassing present-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Northern Italy. It covered an area of . Ac ...

. Vere Herbert, the heroine of Ouida's 1880 novel ''Moths'' is described as living under the , "...within a few miles of the brilliant Hell onaco" In 1897,

Gustave Saige Gustave Saige (1838–1905) was a French archivist. He was the archivist of the Prince's Palace of Monaco from 1881 to 1905. Early life Gustave Saige was born on 20 August 1838 in Paris, France. He graduated from the École Nationale des Chartes ...

described it as "a vertical

escarpment An escarpment is a steep slope or long cliff that forms as a result of faulting or erosion and separates two relatively level areas having different elevations. Due to the similarity, the term '' scarp'' may mistakenly be incorrectly used inte ...

of circular shape which gives it a characteristic appearance; it's the Dog's Head." In 1944, Leopold Bohm, a German defence company commander, was stationed on the and saw a low flying airplane crash into the sea, which had been pursued by two other planes. Bohm's observation was on the day of the disappearance of the aviator

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, vicomte de Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (, , ), was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator. Born in Lyon to an French nobility, aristocratic ...

, and it has been speculated that Bohm saw the final flight of Saint-Exupéry. PW0018

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tete De Chien French Riviera Mountains of Alpes-Maritimes Landforms of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur Landforms of Monaco Rock formations of Europe