Marché aux Puces de Plainpalais

About this audio guide

This guide to the Marche aux Puces de Plainpalais in Geneva starts underwater, tracing how the glacier-fed Arve and its shifting, silt-choked channels once made this whole plain a marsh nobody could build on, giving it the name plana palus. It follows the slow draining of the ground through the sixteen hundreds, the cabbages and cardoons grown there once it was farmable, and two floods in the eighteen fifties that briefly reclaimed it from the river. Look down at the crushed granite under your feet while you listen, this ground has been silt far longer than it has been a market.