Source du Lison

Trail description

The walk starts at a car park in Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne, crosses the village and follows waymarked local paths south-east through the woods to the public path facing the Source du Lison. The Lison emerges from a vast cave porch and drops into a wide pool as a blue-green cascade that never dries up, fed by sinkholes and fissures that drain the limestone plateau of Champagnole. When a mill owner planned in 1899 to tap the spring and replace the cascade with a pipe, the villagers fought him in court and won, a case that led to the 1906 Beauquier law, France's first environmental protection law; the site was listed in 1912. The last metres into the cave porch are off limits, so the walk ends at the viewing point. It is about 2.1 km one way; the path tops out at about 434 m in the woods, some 75 m above the village at about 360 m, then descends to the spring, so that rise has to be climbed again on the way back.

Explore more