Saint-Léonard VS

VS is the abbreviation for the canton of Valais in Switzerland and is used to avoid confusion with other entries of the name Saint-Léonard .

Saint-Léonard
State :	Switzerland
Canton :	Valais (VS)
District :	Sierre
BFS no. :	6246
Postal code :	1958
Coordinates :	598 518  /  122 465 coordinates: 46 ° 15 '13 "  N , 7 ° 25' 10"  O ; CH1903:  598,518  /  122 465
Height :	498  m above sea level M.
Height range :	493–931 m above sea level M.
Area :	3.88  km²
Residents:	2446 (December 31, 2018)
Population density :	630 inhabitants per km²
Website:	www.st-leonard.ch
Saint-Léonard VS
Location of the municipality

Saint-Léonard is a political municipality and a civil parish in the district of Sierre and a parish of the deanery Sion in the French-speaking part of the canton of Valais in Switzerland .

Prehistory and early history

Saint-Léonard has several archaeological sites.

• The rock carvings of Crête-des-Barmes, which Burkhard Reber discovered in 1912 on an area of ​​110 m² and which Pierre Corboud examined in 1974, show four-phase overlapping engravings from the Neolithic .

1. In the oldest period the odorant, shown more or less schematically, appears repeatedly. The bowls with one or two concentric circles are also assigned to this phase.
2. A meander representation and representations of trees, snakes and soles of the feet belong to this period.
3. Period 3 shows highly schematized oranges and anthropomorphic steles, which are comparable to the engraved steles by Sion, Petit Chasseur.
4. The most recent period is mainly assigned to pecked areas that form square and rectangular figures.

• On the alluvial cone of the Lienne, in today's village of Saint-Léonard, there seems to have been an extensive Middle Neolithic settlement that Sauter discovered in 1961. In Les Bâtiments 1975-1977 three stone boxes of the Chamblandes type came to light, which contained four, three or one person (in a stool position) together with corpse burns. The number of people buried allowed it to be classified in a late phase of the Cortaillod culture , from which the settlement at Sur-le-Grand-Pré also comes.
• The settlement near Sur-le-Grand-Pré, discovered by Marc-Rodolphe Sauter in 1956 and excavated until 1962, is located on a ridge (498 m) above the Rhone. Its core area lies in a long depression filled with postglacial loess, four to six meters wide. The most informative part of the settlement dates from the Middle Neolithic (3700–3350 BC) to which numerous pits in the sterile loess can be assigned. Thanks to the material, a Saint-Léonard facies could be defined, a real mixture of elements of the Chassey-Lagozza-Cortaillod culture with large southern (Lagozza) references. Most of the stone tools are made of rock crystal . The splitting of rock by sawing was introduced. The ceramic is decorated with fluting . It is possible that some of the material belongs to an older culture (around 4000–3700 BC) which has elements similar to the Chasséen (Protochasséen). The more than a meter thick layer of earth above the Neolithic layer contains traces of prehistoric and Roman times, but was dug up for viticulture.

population

Population development
year	1802	1850	1900	1950	2000	2010	2012	2014	2016
Residents	140	366	678	1070	1872	2117	2171	2209	2263

Attractions

See also : List of cultural assets in Saint-Léonard

• The oldest petroglyphs and bowls in Switzerland can be found on the Crête-des-Barmes above the village .
• The largest underground lake in Europe is located in the municipality : 300 m long, 20 m wide and 10 m deep. Visits in the boat with multilingual commentary are carried out.

Personalities

• Henri Schwery (* 1932 in Saint-Léonard), cardinal

literature

• Alain Gallay and Bernard Truffer: Saint-Léonard. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . 2011 .

Web links

Commons : Saint-Léonard VS  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Saint-Léonard VS on the ETHorama platform
• The petroglyphs ( Memento from January 15, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
• Official website of the municipality of Saint-Léonard
• Site of the Lac Souterrain operator

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Permanent and non-permanent resident population by year, canton, district, municipality, population type and gender (permanent resident population). In: bfs. admin.ch . Federal Statistical Office (FSO), August 31, 2019, accessed on December 22, 2019 .