Grande Cariçaie

The Grande Cariçaie follows the south and then the east shore of Lake Neuchâtel for some forty kilometres, over an area of about 30 km². The vegetation is ordered in bands parallel to the water: submerged meadows on the shallows, a belt of reeds, sedge meadows, riverine woodland and finally gallery forest, broken by bays, ponds, streams and molasse cliffs down which the water falls. About 800 plant species have been recorded here and probably more than 10,000 animal species, close to a quarter of Swiss flora and fauna; it is the country's foremost breeding ground for waterfowl and waders. The intercantonal nature reserves cover about 3,000 hectares — the source counts them sometimes as eight, sometimes as nine.

The landscape is not immemorial: it is the by-product of an engineering scheme. The Jura water correction, carried out from 1868 to 1891 and resumed from 1962 to 1973, lowered the lake by 2.7 metres. The bed of the former shallows was left in the open air, and the marshes that the same works were draining elsewhere — the Grand Marais, the Orbe plain — found here a refuge with almost identical conditions. A few years after the works ended, the matching ecosystems had settled in. The shore was listed under the Ramsar convention on wetlands of international importance in 1976, then again in 1990.

The site came close to disappearing a second time. In the 1970s the route chosen for the N1 motorway ran along the south shore. In the early 1980s a campaign led by Pro Natura Helvetica, the Swiss League for the Protection of Nature and the WWF gathered 560,000 signatures and 4 million francs — mostly from German-speaking Switzerland, where television had carried the appeal further. The route was moved in 1981. Conservation management began in 1982: mowing, scrub clearance, pond digging and scientific monitoring, under an intercantonal mandate given to the Association de la Grande Cariçaie, based in Yverdon-les-Bains.

The shore also keeps a far longer memory. Human presence is attested here from 13,000 BC, and the bays have held pile-dwelling villages since 4000 BC: between Yverdon and Cudrefin there are thirteen Neolithic or Bronze Age stations, six of them archaeological sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The wet ground preserved the timber. The name itself is recent: it comes from the sedges — the genus Carex, and above all the stiff sedge that abounds here — and was proposed by Michel Antoniazza, a scientific collaborator of the Association.

Why this place is remarkable

Switzerland's largest marsh is an industrial accident turned refuge: by lowering the lake 2.7 metres in order to drain marshes, the Jura water correction manufactured another one, where the species driven out elsewhere came to settle. The shore now concentrates close to a quarter of the country's flora and fauna, and thirteen prehistoric lake stations sleep in the same mud.

History and origin

The relief is young and entirely tied to the water level: prehistoric variations of the lake are estimated at 7 metres, and the artificial drop of 2.7 metres between 1868 and 1891 left a wide fringe of shallows dry. Behind the marshes, molasse cliffs mark the natural limit of the landscape and separate it from the farmed hinterland. Protection was built in three stages: listing under the Ramsar convention in 1976 and 1990, the shifting of the motorway route in 1981, conservation management from 1982.