Beauvivier Tower

En un regard

Le château en bref

Beauvivier Tower is the only standing remnant of the former fortified house that controlled the lordship of the same name, at the head of Lake Annecy, in the commune of Doussard. It now stands on the edge of a reedbed in the Bout-du-Lac National Nature Reserve, between the mouths of the Eau-Morte and the Ire. This roofless, square keep measures about 7.30 m by 6.90 m and rises some ten metres. Its very thick walls, built of roughly squared limestone rubble, enclose an interior space of about 3.20 m on each side. The ground floor has no openings: access was through an arched doorway on the first floor. In the Middle Ages, the tower did not stand alone. Around 1305, the texts describe a fortified house with a chapel, surrounded by ditches, which held high justice and administered a farming estate with barns, mills, fisheries and a port through which grain bound for the Maurienne and the Tarentaise passed. Alluvium from the Eau-Morte gradually silted up the site, which was then abandoned. The lords of Duingt held the lordship, which later passed to the Stockalper, the Monthoux and finally the marquises de Sales. Consolidated in the early 1990s, the tower belongs to the commune. A metal staircase leads to its top, from which visitors can take in the marsh and the lake at the end of the reserve's interpretive trail.