Moudon

Moudon occupies a spur around which the Broye bends, in the district of Broye-Vully. The old town stretches along a single street on the fortified ridge, between the castle and the reformed church of Saint-Étienne, rebuilt in the 13th and 14th centuries on an earlier parish church. The municipality, with 6,646 inhabitants at the end of 2024 across 1,571 hectares, extends north to the Bussy-sur-Moudon plateau and west to the Cerjaule forests; its highest point, the wooded Bourlayes hill, reaches 850 metres. District capital of Moudon from 1798 to 2007, it joined the new Broye-Vully district in 2008.

The site was occupied as early as Roman times under the name Minnodunum, attested around 280; the present name appears in 1161. In 1011, the place passed into the domain of the bishop of Lausanne, before Count Amadeus I of Geneva raised a castrum there around 1127, the probable nucleus of the upper town. The dukes of Zähringen seized it around 1190, and Count Thomas I of Savoy received its investiture, as an imperial fief, on 1 June 1207.

Around 1260, Peter II of Savoy installed the seat of the Vaud bailiwick at Moudon: the town became an administrative and judicial centre, capital of the États de Vaud. It came under Bernese rule in 1536 and remained so until the end of the Ancien Régime. Between 1830 and 1850, its old gates were demolished and its streets widened. The old town, listed in the federal inventory of Swiss heritage sites (ISOS), preserves the castle and its Romanesque tower, the Layaz tower, several manor houses and the Fountain of Justice; Moudon has belonged since 2017 to the association Les plus beaux villages de Suisse.

The painter Eugène Burnand (1850-1921) and the poet Philippe Jaccottet (1925-2021) were born in Moudon. Taking refuge in the town in 1792, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is said, according to his biography, to have discovered the fondue recipe there. Residents are nicknamed the Mange-Plumes ('feather-eaters') and the Traîne-Bailli.

Why this place is remarkable

Few towns in Vaud offer such a direct reading of medieval power: a single spur carries, along its ridge, the succession of its masters — the castrum of the counts of Geneva, the Savoy stronghold that housed the Vaud bailiwick, then the Bernese bailiwick. Squeezed onto one street between ramparts and cliff, the upper town never had room to spread: it simply layered itself, up to the present church, whose 14th-century bell tower still dominates the rooftops.

History and origin

The name Moudon probably derives from the Celtic *Minnos and dūnon, 'citadel' or 'fortified enclosure'; its first written trace, as Minnodunum, dates to around 280. The spur on which the old town rises divides the Broye valley into two unequal slopes: steep, wooded terrain to the east, farmed hills to the west, up to the 850 metres of the wooded Bourlayes hill, the municipality's highest point.