AFTER NEARLY FOUR YEARS

And an estimated €400 million refurbishment, the grande dame of hotels is back: the gold swan taps in the bathrooms are shinier, the peach bathrobes are fluffier, the flat-screen TVs are hung in gilded frames and they’ll even monogram your new initials onto your pillowcases. Welcome back, The Ritz, Paris. It’s spectacularly extravagant – a bit like staying inside a lavish wedding cake – and the perfect spot for a little Parisian romance.

The wining and dining options are outstanding: bag yourself an alcove in the Grand Jardin among the linden trees and magnolia, or people-watch in the new Les Jardins de L’Espadon with its retractable glass roof (perfect for balmy nights) and breathe in the jasmine as you sip your pre-dinner Martini. Speaking of drinks, Bar Hemingway – named after the great writer himself – is a must. The story goes that the night Paris was liberated in 1944, he holed up here and ran up a tab for 51 dry Martinis. These days, mixologist Colin Field whips up a wonderful Serendipity – calvados, apple juice and Champagne with fresh mint – which is guaranteed to please. Michele, the concierge, is pure magic and can arrange anything from a private cruise down the Seine to last-minute VIP tickets to art shows.

And when darkness falls, slink back to the Mansart suite and step onto your very own wraparound terrace with views across the Place Vendôme to the Eiffel Tower and beyond.

OUR KIND OF LUXE

Shrug off any lingering stress at the new spa, which features the world’s first and only Chanel treatments. And the best part? The Chanel facials are followed up with full make-up sessions, so you can roll off the couch looking groomed rather than groggy. GO A Superior Room costs from £850 per night; ritzparis.com

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Jura Mountains, France/Switzerland

Jurassic

Now for a walk in the mountains – the Jura Mountains to be precise, straddling the border between Switzerland and France. The name Jura derives from an ancient Celtic word meaning ‘forest’, and these tree-covered peaks mark the more verdant western end of the Alps. What brings us here is a term from palaeontology that has been shaped and reshaped over hundreds of millions of years.

There can’t be many terms from the geological timeline that have fallen into mainstream use, but Jurassic is certainly one – and you can thank the author Michael Crichton and film director Steven Spielberg for that. Crichton’s 1990 science fiction novel Jurassic Park and its resultant film franchise, in which dinosaurs are reborn using DNA extracted from fossilised mosquitoes, have helped lift a term from fairly obscure geological contexts into practically every English speaker’s vocabulary. Certainly, the same can’t be said for the word Jurassic’s geological contemporaries: Ordovician Park doesn’t have quite the same ring to it (and, admittedly, a theme park filled with the kinds of primitive molluscs and jawless fish that developed during the Ordovician Period wouldn’t be quite as menacing as Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs). But if we can thank the success of Jurassic Park for the word’s familiarity today, who can we thank for the word Jurassic itself?

This story begins with the terrifically named Abraham Gottlob Werner, born in Silesia (now in modern-day Poland) in 1749. A mining inspector by trade, in the late 1700s Werner became interested in the differences between the geology of one region and another, and one strata of rocks compared to the others around it.

Quite correctly, he theorised that these different rock formations must correspond to different periods in the history of the Earth. Less accurate was his follow-up theory: that the Earth began life covered in a single vast mineral-rich ocean. This enormous primordial sea, Werner believed, steadily receded over thousands of years while depositing the different rocks that now make up our landscape at different periods in time.

This water-based theory of the Earth’s geology fittingly became known as Neptunism, after the Roman god of the sea. But eventually it was proved to be misguided, and Neptunism was superseded by better-informed theories in the nineteenth century. Werner’s notion that different rock formations corresponded to different geological time periods nevertheless endured – and that brings us to the next character in our story: the Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt, born in Berlin in 1769.

Humboldt’s contribution to science is so gargantuan that labelling him merely a ‘geographer’ does not do him justice. Among the countless disciplines his work influenced are geology, botany, zoology, mineralogy, meteorology, geomagnetism, astronomy and navigation, besides which he carved out a career as an explorer, travelling extensively around the Americas on a grand five-year voyage from 1799 to 1804. As a result, everything from a species of South American penguin to a Peruvian sea current have been named in his honour – but it’s another contribution to our dictionary that concerns us now.

In 1795, shortly before his American expedition, Humboldt found himself on a tour of the French-Swiss mountains. While out walking one day, he began to contemplate the geology of the region around him and attempted to ally what he saw with Werner’s theories. Werner had classified the limestone mountains of Central Europe as Muschelkalk – literally ‘mussel chalk’, a type of seashell-bearing limestone deposited relatively late in Earth’s timeline. Humboldt, however, thought otherwise.

‘I became convinced,’ he later wrote, ‘that the Jura limestone was a distinct formation’, isolated between a distinct layer of older gypsum above it, and newer sandstone below. This ‘Jurassic’ limestone did not fit with Werner’s theory and so, Humboldt believed, must have been formed at a different period of time.

Later geologists picked up on Humboldt’s ideas, and began to identify ever more subtle differences between Werner’s original classifications. Eventually, an entirely new classification of rock was established – along with an entirely new stage of geological time, with its own fossil record and unique flora and fauna. Thanks to Humboldt’s Alpine holiday, it took a name honouring the Jura mountains: the Jurassic period, as we now know it, had finally arrived.

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