  We present the first Public Data Release (PDR-1) of the VIMOS Public
Extragalactic Survey (VIPERS). It comprises 57 204 spectroscopic measurements
together with all additional information necessary for optimal scientific
exploitation of the data, in particular the associated photometric measurements
and quantification of the photometric and survey completeness. VIPERS is an ESO
Large Programme designed to build a spectroscopic sample of ' 100 000 galaxies
with iAB < 22.5 and 0.5 < z < 1.5 with high sampling rate (~45%). The survey
spectroscopic targets are selected from the CFHTLS-Wide five-band catalogues in
the W1 and W4 fields. The final survey will cover a total area of nearly 24
deg2, for a total comoving volume between z = 0.5 and 1.2 of ~4x10^7
h^(-3)Mpc^3 and a median galaxy redshift of z~0.8. The release presented in
this paper includes data from virtually the entire W4 field and nearly half of
the W1 area, thus representing 64% of the final dataset. We provide a detailed
description of sample selection, observations and data reduction procedures; we
summarise the global properties of the spectroscopic catalogue and explain the
associated data products and their use, and provide all the details for
accessing the data through the survey database (http://vipers.inaf.it) where
all information can be queried interactively.
