Tour-de-Peilz (La)

A little town nested between Vevey and Montreux, on the Swiss Riviera. The Swiss Museum of Games is located in the Castle of La Tour-de-Peilz.

With a smaller population than Vevey, La Tour-de-Peilz (10,000 inhabitants) has a more residential feel. While the town centre has retained a number of names inherited from its medieval past (rue des Remparts, Bourg-Dessous), and the houses on either side of the Grand-Rue are grouped together in contiguous order as they were when the ramparts enclosed them (a fragment of the ramparts remains next to the church of Saint-Théodule), as soon as you leave the centre of the town, you see villas that are at ease in their opulent gardens, and even mansions such as La Faraz, La Doges, and the castles of Sully, Burier and La Poneyre.

But there are also some very modern, even eco-friendly, homes, such as the one at the top left of Chemin des Bulesses, which relies on the sun for most of its heating and collects rainwater for everyday use. As for the Villa Augusta, built in 1851 for the Princess of Liegnitz, the morganatic wife of King Frederick William III of Prussia (who died in 1840), it became a hotel under the name of Résidence Rive-Reine and then, renovated and extended by Nestlé, an international training centre.

Near the port, the castle overlooks a romantic promenade. It's a great place to sit on your way out of the Musée du Jeu (Swiss Museum of Games) and ponder the Savoy Alps and the light of the lake. The history of the fortress, which has been in municipal ownership since 1979, was not always idyllic, and the Burgundy Wars had tragic repercussions for the region.

Much later, La Tour-de-Peilz became a haven for the painter Gustave Courbet, who was implicated in a trial opened in 1873 against sympathisers of the Paris Commune, for having proposed the removal of the Vendôme column. Courbet died in La Tour-de-Peilz on 31 December 1877. A sculptor in his spare time, the artist left a bronze bust dedicated to freedom near the church. A school and a street bear his name.