Where would you expect to find the world’s largest indoor crocodile park? Australia? Africa? Probably not in France — and especially not in Provence.

But La Ferme aux Crocodiles, an 8,000 sq m glasshouse in Pierrelatte, near Montélimar, is exactly that — and a world-respected centre for research and conservation of a predator that has now become more hunted than hunter.

Don’t expect to see crocodile handbags and shoes at the souvenir shop or in a burger at the snack bar. This is a place for visitors — 300,000 of them every year — to appreciate the crocodiles at close, but safe, quarters. Squeals of terrified delight from children, and more than a few adults, testify to their edgy appeal. Feeding time on Wednesdays and Sundays is popular with inmates and visitors alike as the crocodiles lunge at salmon and rabbit heads as well as chicken carcasses.

It’s a boy’s dream come true for Luc Fougeirol, the 53-year-old founder of this home to 300 females and 35 males.

Fougeirol’s obsession with reptiles started when he was 10 and his uncle turned up at the family farm in southern Morocco with a box containing a cobra. “When I was a boy, I had a terrarium in my room,” he says, grinning. “Now I live in a terrarium.”

His family returned to France when he was 14. He bought a Venezuelan caiman from a pet shop in Marseilles, and called it James. He says his mother “wasn’t all that happy”, but James proved a hit with his fellow students after he took it to school. Nine species of crocodile from around the world, including the Nile, South Africa, Mississippi, the Amazon, China and Nepal, live at the farm, in basins of sand and water set below a viewing walkway. Multilingual Q & A flip-signs provide basic facts, and guides fluent in several European languages offer information. A glass passage under the pens allows visitors to view the inmates from below.

The farm is also home to other animals, such as tortoises from the Galapagos islands and the Seychelles.

The day I visited, a female crocodile was sweeping sand away with her hind legs to make a hole for eggs. This irritated her neighbour, who snapped her jaws around the other female’s entire head. The sound was that of one hard surface meeting another, like prehistoric bone on bone.

Luc and Eric Fougeirol work in partnership with French and foreign scientists at the farm. They believe that protecting crocodiles, threatened by hunting and habitat shrinkage, requires creating the kind of awareness that their farm provides. The females lay up to 34 eggs, which are moved to a hatchery. Once born the young are kept away from their elders — who tend to want to eat them — and their development is monitered by scientists.

This summer a team of artists will build a model of the largest crocodile that ever existed — the 12m (40ft) Sarcosuchus imperator, which disappeared 110 million years ago. The farm was worried that in the lead-up to the French presidential election the reptile’s name was too similar to that of Nicolas Sarkozy and asked for his permission to go ahead with the project. He agreed — and has been invited to visit his long-toothed homonym after it has been built.

Details: La Ferme aux Crocodiles (00 33 4 75 04 33 73, www.lafermeaux crocodiles.com) is open daily from 9.30am to 7pm (April to October) and from 9.30am to 5pm (November to March). Entrance: Adults € 8 (£5), children (aged from 3 to 12), € 6 (£4). Wheelchair access.

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