Top Of The Lake

They may be less widely venerated than their Italian or Swiss equivalents, but the lakes of Savoy in the French Alps overflow with romance and echoes of Rousseau

- Steve King

Mention Savoy and the first thing to spring to mind, unless it's a smart hotel in London, is likely to be the Alps-Mont Blanc in particular. Where there are mountains, there are generally lakes as well, and so it is in Savoy. If you run a fingertip from top right to bottom left on a map, the four main lakes are Geneva (or Léman), Annecy, Bourget, and Aiguebelette. If your fingertip kept going, it would soon arrive in the city of Grenoble. Together, they make an excellent set of coordinates for the would-be explorer, especially in spring and summernot least because, in their inherent watery flatness, they direct the gaze not so much up and down as outwards and across: a landscape axis rather than portrait.

Savoy has an uncommonly complicated history: coveted and contested, haggled over and passed around; first a county, then a duchy, eventually a kingdom, and nowadays, a mere region. Following its annexation by France in 1860, it was subdivided into two départements, or administrative districts: Savoie and Haute-Savoie. Referring to them both at once as Savoy is a slight simplification. But a useful one.

I started my journey around the four lakes in Evian-lesBains on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, in the company of Céline Guillermin, a Savoyard with the face of a silentmovie star and the volubility of Eddie Murphy. What struck me about Evian was the extent to which it lives up to its own billing a prosperous spa town of the belle époque, famed for its mineral-rich water, that subsequently became a more prosperous spa town, still famed for its mineral-rich water.