The Devil's Bridge Gorges
 
 Société des Gorges du Pont du Diable 

LE JOTTY - 74200 LA VERNAZ - FRANCE
Tél. : +33 (0)4 50 72 10 39 - Fax : +33 (0)4 50 72 11 89
E-mail : info@lepontdudiable.com

- A ministry-classified site -
(May 18th 1908)
Version française
[ French version ]


[ Open from May
to September
]

daily
from 9 am
to 6 or 7 pm

depending on
light conditions.

Average
visit time :
45 mn


 


Car park
Hotel & restaurant
nearby
Quick service restaurant present

Here, you'll find a selection of our most beautiful pictures.
Choose and click to enlarge...
 

 

Our walk starts by taking up through a magnificent beech wood; it continues some seventy meters further down, along a path anchored to the rock. We come to the first stairway, trough a chaotic mass of huge blocks embedded between the walls of the gorge, giving us an unheralded spectacle : the Dranse running nearly fifty meters below our feet, at the bottom of a veritable chasm.

The sides of the gorge have the appearance of immense wall-hangings and there are curious excavations, the "giants'cooking-pots" carved out by the swirling waters, which add to the site's fantastic nature. All the way along, erosion has produced veritable sculptures in a high-quality material : grey marble, a local "geological cousin"of one that used to be quarried in La Vernaz. The running water has covered it with richly coloured deposits and the morning walker is rewarded at around ten o'clock by a magical palette of greys, greens, ochres and blues, shifting and mingling at the whim of the sun's first rays.

These gorges were originally an underground layer hollowed out by water percolating through. The chaotic mass obstructing its upper part was caused when the roof disintergrated. Another vestige of this collaps, an isolated rock, forms an imposing arch more than thirty meters above the torrent: the Devil's Bridge.