Serre-Ponçon: The Alpine Lake, the Drowned Valley and Boscodon Abbey

Required Activities

• Swim, paddle or sail on Lac de Serre-Poncon out to the Ilot Saint-Michel and its chapel, a 17th-century rebuild of the one the Duke of Savoy's troops destroyed in 1692, saved because it stood just above the planned high-water line; it is walled up, and at low water you can walk up to the door but not inside

• Walk across the Pont de Savines, 924m of bridge and the only crossing of the lake, and look down at the water over old Savines, where 225 of the 417 buildings condemned for the reservoir were pulled down before the valley filled

• Visit the Muséoscope du Lac at Rousset, with its models of the drowned villages and its films on the building of the dam

• Visit the abbey of Boscodon at Crots, founded in 1142 by monks of the Chalais order and standing at 1,150m in the forest above the lake, and in the abbey church pick out the cross, square, circle and pentagon its builders set out with rule and compass

• Find the Portail du Real on Embrun Cathedral, the Lombard porch whose two columns stand on crouching lions; it sheltered the miraculous Adoration of the Magi fresco for over two centuries until Protestants destroyed it in 1585, and behind it is the Tetramorph tympanum the fresco had covered