The place of rivers

Rivers are the living trace of the civilisations that have peopled their banks. Water for the towns, water for the fields, water for energy and transport, water for biodiversity: rivers irrigate in every meaning of the term life in the territories they cross. How can all the uses and all the essential services they render be reconciled at the same time as water resources are becoming scarcer? How can the world’s rivers be protected from pollution so that their ecosystems, and ourselves by consequence, remain in good health? For us, rivers are essential partners since they embody some of the responses. Treated with more respect, exploited with more ambition, they could contribute to a new mode of development that we all know is necessary.

The Rhone, a living natural space

Human beings have developed the Rhone over the centuries to reduce the harmful effects of its floods, for example, by building dikes called “corrections” in Switzerland as early as 1863.

The Rhone has a great variety of magnificent natural landscapes: from the Swiss glacier whence it springs to flow 267 km through alpine mountains, and then on to France where it flows for 545 km through the very varied territories of three regions (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur and Occitanie) and 11 departments before reaching the Mediterranean.

It is also composed of oxbows, reaches of calm water linked to the main channel during floods. It is dotted with many islands and is home to a thriving biodiversity of flora and fauna that live in its waters and on its banks. It crosses towns like Sion, Martigny, Lausanne and Geneva in Switzerland, then in France, the cities of Lyon, Avignon and Arles, and smaller towns.

The Rhone has also given rise to legends such as that of the Tarasque, a kind of crocodile that devoured men and boats, since labelled by UNESCO by virtue of its Intangible Cultural Heritage and celebrated at Tarascon on the last weekend of June.

A river with multiple uses

The first of these is irrigation. The water of the Rhone irrigates the Valais and the Rhone Valley, where fruit and vegetables are grown, and the Camargue for its rice. Navigation is the second. A corridor between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe since antiquity, The Rhone is now a wide gauge waterway stretching 330 km between Lyon and the Mediterranean on which sail barges loaded with containers and river cruisers for passengers.

Another important use is hydroelectricity production.

In France, 19 hydropower plants produce the equivalent of the electricity consumption of 6 million people.

The water is also used for a strategic purpose, the cooling of nuclear power plants.

The leisure

Lastly, there is leisure: first of all, angling, then cycling with the ViaRhona, the cycle track from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean Sea. Other sports are practised such as rafting, sailing, canoeing, rowing and nautical jousting, an ancestral sport dating back to the middle-ages.