Cascade de la Pissevache

The Pissevache drops 116 metres down the left flank of the Rhône valley, between the village of Vernayaz and the hamlet of Miéville, in the district of Saint-Maurice. The water comes from the Salanfe, which runs above the cliff; the place is also known as the Salanfe fall. It gives itself all at once: a white sheet laid against dark rock, a dry pale slope beside it, then the water setting off again in threads between the boulders, level with the grass.

Few falls have been looked at for so long. Goethe stopped here in 1779 and judged that it deserved its fame more than many others. The Jura folklorist Désiré Monnier drew it on 25 September 1845. From the 1860s the visit was organised: a walkway built in 1866 at mid-height took visitors under the water, for one franc.

Today's flow is no longer the one in those accounts. Between 1947 and 1950 the Salanfe dam was built upstream and the Miéville hydroelectric station drew off the water: since then the fall has thinned considerably and its volume depends on rainfall. Depending on the season and the rain, the sheet seen in photographs can shrink to a few threads.

Why this place is remarkable

Two histories overlap here, and they concern the same water. One is a history of looking: travellers, painters, a writer who came in 1779, a paying walkway under the fall from 1866. The other is a history of use: the same water drove saws and trip hammers, then one of the earliest hydroelectric plants, before being held back upstream. The Pissevache is a celebrated landscape that was put to work, and what falls today is what the dam lets through.

History and origin

From the 17th to the 19th century the water of the fall drove mills and other contrivances: a hydraulic saw, a trip hammer. As late as 1894 a woodworking factory settled here to use it. At the end of the 19th century a hydroelectric plant was built at the top of the fall, the Pissevache station; the sources consulted count it among the oldest. The break came in the middle of the 20th century, with the Salanfe dam, built from 1947 to 1950, and the Miéville station, which take off most of the flow.