St-Prex in the fog, March 2013

Dwight Peck's personal website

St-Prex in the fog, March 2013

It's a lazy Saturday and we're going to go for a look at St-Prex on the lakeside.

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

St-Prex is a very old village built onto a peninsula on the Swiss shores of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman), which today, 9 March 2013, is wrapped in fog like cotton wool.

We're out for a bracing walk, and we'll begin with a kilometre's stroll along the shore path to a park near the water purification plant (STEP), then back again into the village centre.

Now we're trotting into the village, which is attested from A.D. 885 under the name Sanctus Prothasius and still sports a town castle dating from 1234. It's got a conventional commercial zone and modern residential agglomeration mostly uphill above the Route du Lac (the principal lake road) and the railway line, but the lakeside peninsula is as charming an old town as you can find. Even in the fog.

St-Prex is a village of 5,000 worthy souls, of whom nearly 2/3 are Swiss citizens and the rest of whom are resident foreign nationals (not unlike ourselves) working in the region. St-Prex's an easy commute on the lakeside railway or the autoroute between Genève and Lausanne and only 5 or 6 km west of Morges. (By "worthy souls" we can understand 39% self-reported Catholics, 36% Protestants, 3% Islamic, 1% Orthodox, 0.21% Jewish, and 8 Buddhists (13% are Godless Heathens).

Distressingly, the far-right-wing Union démocratique du centre (UDC; Schweizerische Volks Partie, Swiss People's Party, or SVP, in German) takes 26% of the vote, but our PS (Parti socialiste suisse) usually gets about 20%, and the Greens and the Liberals each get about 14%.

Some of the village houses, with courtyards and access to the shore, probably cost a packet.

The main street from the village gate

Zoom on the gate

Street scenes

Street scenes. We're wending through town to pick up a hiking path to the north.

The débarcadère. The CGN steamships put in here in the summer.

Now we've cantered a few kilometres up north of town and down into the ravine of the mighty river Boiron to mush our way along the muddy Sentier de la Truite ("Trout Path").

Rustic lodgings

The Sentier de la Truite celebrates the successful restoration of the Boiron to fishfulness, culminating at the educational Maison de la Rivière where the creek flows out into Lake Geneva.