Leuk

Leuk — Loèche in French — occupies a slope turned to the south at 731 metres, exactly where the Rhône valley begins a slight bend: from the town the view runs downstream as far as Martigny. A plateau rises above it, carrying a large satellite receiving station. Capital of its district, the municipality covers 55.36 km², almost half of it wooded, and counted 4,340 inhabitants at the end of 2024.

It is one of the few Valais municipalities to hold both banks of the Rhône. On the left bank, on the valley floor, La Souste settled at the foot of an immense alluvial fan built by the debris of the Illgraben. West of the torrent begins the Finges forest, the Pfynwald, one of the largest pine woods in central Europe, protected as a reserve; to the east lies a wide patchwork of hedgerows and meadows. Between a bed of the Rhône left without embankments, this wood and the dry grasslands of the slope, Leuk is a significant nesting site and a centre for birdwatching.

The built fabric records the town's double allegiance. The church of St Stephen, Gothic beneath a Romanesque tower, keeps its frescoes, an archaeological crypt and a charnel house painted with a dance of death; the wall of skulls that goes with it runs for more than 20 metres. The bishop's castle, long the summer residence of the bishops of Sion, has been given contemporary interventions designed by Mario Botta; around it stand the Renaissance De Werra castle, a pentagonal town hall and the fortified Dala tower. Between the town and La Souste, the Ringacker pilgrimage chapel, built in 1694, holds a high altar completed in 1705 by the sculptor Johann Sigristen and the second oldest organ in Valais, after the one in the basilica of Valère.

Vines hold the slope — petite arvine, pinot noir, fendant — and a vineyard path 66 kilometres long sets out from here to reach Martigny. The municipality speaks German at 86.9%, with a French-speaking minority of 12.3%: the language border runs close by, and the place carries two names without either driving out the other.

Why this place is remarkable

Leuk owes its singularity to a position. The town clings to the last slope before the Rhône valley turns, and the municipality, one of the few in Valais to own both banks, adds up landscapes that rarely meet in one place: the alluvial fan of the Illgraben, the Finges pine forest, a river left without embankments, and above them a town of stone where the bishop's castle has received the hand of Mario Botta.

History and origin

The name appears in 515 in an archival document, in the form Leuca; its origin is still debated, linked to an Indo-European root for light — in Gaulish, leucos meant bright, shining. The Romans, who improved the nearby Gemmi pass, introduced the vine here. In 1142 Leuk passed under the control of the prince-bishopric of Sion and the castle became the bishop's summer residence; around 1260 the town obtained its franchises and its standing as an independent town. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it counted more than twenty mills and as many lawyers in practice. The Reformation found its Valais focus here, led by Michael Mageran, before Leuk remained Catholic after all. On the night of 27 May 1799 the battle of Finges set the French against the Upper Valaisans, who were defeated, and the town was sacked. In 2013 the former municipality of Erschmatt was attached to it.