Heritage guide: Saint-Jorioz and the lakeside villages of Lake Annecy

The pile-dwelling villages — 6,000 years beneath the waters

Between 4000 and 800 BC, the shores of Lake Annecy saw a succession of villages built on stilts. These wooden dwellings, known as "palafittiques" (from the Italian palafitta, "driven pile", from the Latin palus and figere), were built right at the lake's edge on raised platforms. Their inhabitants grew cereals and pulses, raised cattle and sheep, and fished. The gradual rise of the waters submerged the villages but, paradoxically, preserved them: starved of oxygen, the piles — mainly oak, but also ash and fir — survived through the millennia, forming an exceptional record of daily life in the Neolithic.

Les Marais de Saint-Jorioz — a major archaeological site

The Marais de Saint-Jorioz site, beneath the waters of the lake opposite the village, is one of the oldest pile-dwelling sites in the Alps: it dates from the Middle Neolithic, around 4000-3500 BC. The first pile dwellings of Lake Annecy were identified as early as 1856 at Duingt and Sevrier, in the wake of the 1854 Swiss discovery on Lake Zurich. The Saint-Jorioz site itself was only spotted in 1989. It has yielded pottery, flint tools, polished stone axes and arrowheads, attesting to an organised society skilled in agriculture, weaving and trade with communities sometimes hundreds of kilometres away.

UNESCO World Heritage (2011)

In 2011, the Marais de Saint-Jorioz site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the "Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps". This listing brings together 111 sites spread across six countries: Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Slovenia. Lake Annecy holds three of these sites — Les Marais de Saint-Jorioz, the Crêt de Chatillon (in Sevrier) and Les Mongets — among the best-documented of the Alpine lakes. The listing protects these fragile remains, invisible from the surface yet of inestimable scientific value for understanding Europe's earliest farming societies.

Le Marais de l'Enfer — a biodiversity refuge

Despite its ominous name, the Marais de l'Enfer is a natural haven of peace. This wetland of around 25 hectares, straddling the communes of Saint-Jorioz and Sevrier, enjoys multiple protections: Natura 2000, a prefectural biotope decree, and ownership by the Conservatoire du Littoral (France's Coastal Conservancy) since 2002. The reedbeds shelter remarkable fauna and flora: Eurasian Reed Warblers and Spotted Crakes among the phragmites, protected dragonflies such as the Southern Damselfly and the Western Clubtail, and several orchids including Loesel's Twayblade, a species of European interest. The marsh plays a major ecological role by buffering the waters before they reach the lake. A waymarked interpretive trail lets visitors discover this fragile ecosystem without disturbing it. In the Neolithic, these marshes already formed a transition zone between solid ground and the lake, the very place where the stilt villages took root.

The old village and Savoyard life

The historic centre of Saint-Jorioz took shape late, at the end of the 19th century, around a new village seat built on the plain to leave behind the old church flooded in the wetlands at the lake's edge. The Saint-Nicolas church, built from 1885 and consecrated in 1897, marks its heart. All around, the old farmhouses with wooden balconies and scale-tile roofs bear witness to Alpine rural life. Saint-Jorioz then lived from agriculture, livestock, lake fishing and its famous tile works, whose scale tiles were shipped from the port until its closure in 1953 — the tile works still appears today on the commune's coat of arms. Fishermen's nets dried on the shore, perpetuating a millennia-old bond between the inhabitants and the lake.

The beach and the natural heritage

The beach of Saint-Jorioz, one of the rare fine-sand beaches on Lake Annecy, offers an exceptional panorama over the Tournette and the Dents de Lanfon. It is also a site steeped in history: a few dozen metres offshore, the piles of the Marais de Saint-Jorioz lie sleeping in the sediment. The lakeside walk between the beach and the port lets you imagine the landscape as it was nearly 6,000 years ago, when the first inhabitants were building their houses above the waters.

Practical information