Swell idea, Vauban! But I'll help detail your
most beautiful country phrase so heart & mind reconcile.
We all think our land is beautiful through attachment to it. Hopefully, it has beauty for real!
There are so many environments and such charms to enjoy from nature and human marvels that all
should have some redeeming features.
To be considered the pinnacle over a variety of choices, you can do either of two things :
- Collect all samples in your set.
-Be the lone owner of any sample.
Strictly geographically speaking, as human marvels add but due to culture are difficult to class & rate,
there are biomes, types of natural areas ( --» environments --» habitats ), and geological structures.
I almost always convey the complete set of those when describing France to one that knows her not.
We have tall mountains and yet such plains that we remain Europe's stockpile of wheat and wood;
we have so much littoral that we get the full spectrum of beaches : warm to frigid with sand, pebble,
rock, cliff, marsh bases; according inland variety : canyons, two deserts, one natural and one man-Made,
for Pete's sake!
( If you had our non-continental parts as one should for they are France too, it gets nearly beyond belief. )
To be sure, I know of other places like this, the US, Canada but more arctic less temperate, India with
less arctic this time more tropical, less temperate, China though specific after which it rapidly dwindles.
I found out why thatlist is short : all others but us have huge expanses over which collect their samples.
Passed the lucky big ones
( Russia's big but Sochi is not the Côte d'Azur for instance! No full set there! ), you're out!
We have it all over half a million square kilometres!
That's why a Tour de France is so important be that of the cyclists with so many stage different scenarios,
of the tourists ( still number one by a 14 million margin over America ) or the old one by apprentices
that made them better for the lands in which they found masters to learn from were indeed different enough
as to bring different materials, environments into play that they had to have given way to different techniques.
It shows in our people too! There's a world of difference between the Corsican or Marseillais civil worker
commonly found napping by a never-to-be-finished hole on the shovel he's too lazy to spike and lift and
the Alsatian employee that needs to be pushed out at closing less you forget him trudging on at his workstation.
( The Bistro-dwelling Parisian office worker falls somewhere in-between by my estimates! 
)
So variety being the spice of life : come to France for whatever reason, stay for all the others; we have them!
Tay.
