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 similar to 100 000 galaxies with i sub(AB) < 22.5 and 0.5 < z < 1.2 with high sampling rate ( similar to 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 deg super(2), for a total comoving volume between z = 0.5 and 1.2 of similar to 4 x 10 super(7) h super(-3) Mpc super(3) and a median galaxy redshift of z similar to 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.